Does Knack Database work on Squarespace?
Knack offers a powerful database solution for embedding bespoke applications on your website.
If you’ve not heard of it before, Knack is an online database building tool, that makes it easy for non-technical users to build business applications.
Knack is a powerful tool to really speed up building and deploying bespoke applications,
“Can I embed my Knack Database Pages on Squarespace?”
From here on in this article, we’ll assume that you know a bit about knack and also how to edit an HTML web page with Squarespace, Wordpress or manually coding and that you understand the <div> or in Squarespace the ‘code block’ component of a page.*
Does Knack embed on Squarespace?
The simple* answer is Yes - and it’s quite easy to combine the two. Like most things, a bit of planning will make life easier. In this explanation, we’ll show how to embed a simple Knack application that displays store locations. (To see this being built see this video.)
Embedding your Knack Database.
Step 1. Prepare website page.
Pick your Website page title, SEO strategy, and decide on where it will live and how users will get to it. When you’re ready, build your web page. The knack application page will start wherever the code block is inserted.
Note: If you have different types of user - for example a manager of the information - then you might want to plan an admin page and another page for users of the information. We’ll cover user planning in another post next month.Whether your app requires users to log in, or the content is available to all users (or a mixture of both) will determine how many website pages you need.
For now we’ll use a simple example of a single page that is available to all website users.
Step 2. Create the Embed Code
Prepare your Knack application as shown in this video, and grab the embed code.
The video here shows you how simple it is to ‘embed’ a Knack application in Squarespace. (In future videos we’ll show you how to build this app from scratch)
We’ve hopefully demonstrated that it’s quite simple to embed a Knack database page on a Squarespace website.
What might not be so obvious, is that this can be embedded on any page of any website - as often as you want - so you can syndicate content and share the app with any website, with just one line of code. The data is centralised and only needs updating once regardless of how many sites the app is used on.
In some respects it’s almost too easy. So… some things to think about
Make sure you are logged out of your Website editing system before testing your app.
Test everything!
Log out of Google Chrome for complete testing of logging in functionality.
You are working in a browser - so for reliable testing we recommend using a fresh browser window in ‘incognito’ or privacy mode which stops the browser using saved versions of (cached) parts of your system.
Ensure only the business processes you want to share are in the User Interface.
Make sure records cannot be deleted by casual users.
check the columns of data are what you want to share
decide before you embed, who can do what with your data: We suggest ‘role playing’ to make sure the application is working for your intended users, before you publish.
Make sure your security model doesn’t reveal more than you want to share….
Above all make sure that you are complying with any Privacy requirements - for example in the EU, GDPR may impact on your Database and what you can put in the public domain.
Conclusion:
Knack provides a valuable addition to Squarespace. It is powerful and flexible and it gives website managers power to integrate the website into company processes without needing to be a database programmer or website coder.
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
Getting the most out of Squarespace and Knack.
At Isoblue we’ve been enthusiastic Squarespace advocates for over twelve years and we’ve built many client apps in Knack. The two work so well together: Knack gives you the ability to take your data online, or looking at it the other way around - Squarespace and knack working together take your customers, employees and exec’s from the website into your company.