What are "derived pages" used for?

Normally every button will represent either a page that SiteGrinder should build or else a link to some already-created page. SiteGrinder determines which Photoshop layers appear on which pages from the page definitions you made with either layer comps or the SiteGrinder Tools Page Definer.

But what happens if you have a button named "folklore" but no page definition or external link named "folklore"?

In this case SiteGrinder will build a page named "folklore.html" anyway. Since there is no layer comp or page definition named "folklore" SiteGrinder must determine what it is supposed to put on this page from somewhere. You can tell SiteGrinder to use one of the layer comps or page definitions you have set up, or you can tell it to base the "orphan" page on the way the Photoshop document looked when you opened SiteGrinder, aka the last document state. A page that gets its content by copying the contents of some other page or the current state of the document is called a "Derived Page".

You can see in the layer palette at left that there are three buttons, "Home-button", "folklore-button", and "google-button".

"Home-button" will generate a page, and the contents of the page will be determined by the layer comp "Home-page" that you can see in the layer comps palette.

"Google-button" won't generate a page because it has an external link specified in the contents of the "google-link" text layer.

But "folklore-button" has neither a link nor a matching layer comp. It's an orphan! The page it represents will either have to be turned off or will have to derive from some other page. By default it will derive its content from the last document state.

In the "Pages" pane of the SiteGrinder user interface you can set which pages derive from which other pages. You can only do this for pages that have no definitions.

Derived pages are especially good for generating templates. You can use SiteGrinder to easily create a number of identical pages with nice graphical navigation menus and edge decoration, then add the page-specific content later in another tool. Fun fact: that's how most of these F.A.Q. pages were generated.