How it Works?
Builder replaces WordPress custom page templates and extends current widgets administration. Think of it as widgets administration, where the whole theme is constructed of sidebar areas, where you may drop your widgets. Also, you may move your sidebars and even put them into hierarchical order.
Editing Selected Template
Once you have clicked on a selected template, you will find several “grids” on right hand side, which are usually named like: Header Area, Featured Area, Main Area and Footer Area. Each of these grids can be expanded by clicking the right hand end and inside are several “sidebar” areas. Although these work just like the sidebars you set up in the widgets page, they are not necessarily used as sidebars within the grid. We are just using the term “sidebars” because that is the technology the elements with the grid are based on.
You can drag and drop widgets from the list on the left into the “sidebars” within the grids to build up your page content. There are special widgets in the theme to let you display posts, lists of posts, comments and all of the things that normally appear on the pages of your sites.
Grid areas (Header area, Footer area, …) have been set up to provide the sort of layouts you expect to find on a website. You can rearrange them in any order you want by dragging and dropping them. You can also turn off or “disable” any of the grids you do not want to use.
The names of the grids are just names. There is no reason why you cannot use “Main Area” as your header and could use “Header Area” for some page content or even as the footer.
You can also change the width of the page and you can change the width of the “sidebars” inside the grids (without editing code of the theme). However, the page width of 960px is pretty standard and what most people want and need. The selection of existing grids will handle most needs.
Template Hierarchy
Template hierarchy used inside Builder extends default WordPress template hierarchy and is used to power grids and widgets. Site-wide tab is on top of hierarchy and is followed by other template tabs. If you edit your grids or widgets inside parent tab, it will be visible inside all child tabs. Example: Navigation widget added inside Site-wide tab, will be visible on all pages, whereas if you add Navigation widget inside Archive tab, it will be visible on archive pages only.
The real power of the Builder is that you are not locked into one layout for all page types. But at the same time, all of the pages inherit the settings from the “Site-wide” page unless you have made specific changes on the different page types.
When you look at one of the other tabs, you will see that the widgets inside the grids have a yellow/orange border around them. This lets you see which are the default widgets and which are the ones added specifically to the layout on that page. If you do not want one of the default widgets on another page you can expand the widget and the normal “delete” link will be shown as “disable”. Disabling a widget stops it showing up on that page, but you cannot delete it as there would be no way to restore it if you changed your mind.
If you change the settings of any of the widgets with yellow borders, these changes will be seen on all pages, because you are actually editing the widget from the “Site-wide” page.
You can add new widgets to any of the grids on the other tabs and they will only show up on the pages of those types.
Note that before a particular page has any custom template settings, it automatically uses any recent changes on the Site-wide layout. However, once edits have been made changes such as rearranging or enabling/disabling grids on the Site-wide page will no longer show up on the other customised layouts.
Some tabs have an option to have different layouts for different subtypes of archive. For instance, the “Archive” tab has the base archive page layout, but using the sub-menu tabs you can change the layout for specific types of archive such as by author, by category, by tab, by date, etc.
The “Single” tab has a base layout, but can then have individual layouts for a multitude of different subtypes of posts. You can have different layouts for each the entry types: Page, Post, Attachment, FAQ, Slider, or Portfolios. But then within each of those you can choose a specific post, page, FAQ, etc and give that individual entry its own specific layout.
Hierarchical approach:
Site-wide
- Home
- Single
-- Single Post Type
--- Single Post ID
- Archive
-- Archive Post Type
--- Taxonomy ID
- Search
- 404
More about WordPress template hierarchy: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy.
Template Grids
Move your grids vertically and even disable them if you feel they’re not needed for some pages.
