Creating a site with many custom layout pages (do I use page builder?)

The benefit to working with a page builder plugin, is that you can create, for example, a “section” with multiple rows and in those rows column-sets. For example, I use Divi with Divi Builder. I can create a section on a page and add my rows and columns to the section, then I can save the entire section to a library and reuse it elsewhere, so I don’t have to rebuild the section over and over again. You can then add a new page and call from the library sections you’ve built previously and stack them in the order you want, or just add a new section with a new layout or whatever.

So, yes, working with Elementor, Divi, WP Bakery, or other page builders is an advantage of Gutenberg, in which I don’t know that you can actually save customized layouts…yet. That may come in some form of plugin in the future, which will allow you to do the same save to library function that the current crop of page builders to.

Hi Tony,

Thanks for your reply!

That’s helpful information, hope you don’t mind, I had a nose and found some of your youtube videos where you expressed some reservations on page builder’s too (nice youtube channel btw and it’s good to hear the pros and cons).

I guess I’m trying to get my head around what the standard practice is (if there is such a thing) for creating lots of content pages on the WordPress platform.

I’ve previously just created custom pages through the page editor using html and shortcodes (along with adding a couple of new templates), but the change to Guttenburg seems to make adding html code here less intuitive or likely. Are there any other good options to approaching this besides page builder plugins or Guttenburg?

Thanks again!
Joe

Sorry, probably talking to myself here. ??

Advanced custom fields plugin looks pretty good?

I think you’re mixing two concepts.

There’s data. That’s ACF supporting additional content added to posts and pages.

There’s layout. That’s taking the data added to a post or page and using a page builder or your own HTML and CSS to structure the information architecture of that data on a page or post.

ACF is not going to help you with templating. It’s going to help you add advanced data sets to your content mix.

I may have said in the past that I wasn’t big into page builders, but for someone like me who doesn’t have time to code custom page templates by hand in HTML and CSS, they are certainly far more useful today than they were in the past

I am using Divi and Divi Builder to eliminate the need for a developer to create custome page templates, which saves both time and money. In addition, laying your site out in a page Builder is far more flexible to change the layout if you don’t like it than asking a developer to come in and rewrote a template by hand.

You’re asking about how to create a website with multiple content sections and layouts and I’m suggesting that you try the library feature of many of these page builders to create your pages and apply the layouts you saved to the library.

As for content in those layouts, that’s obviously tied to what each page is about. There’s no magic bullet that is going to create thst ckntent for you, but you can use ACF and ACF Pro to add additional data sets to your pages and use Custom Post Types to add additional Post Types the admin Dashboard to seperare content like Jobs from content like Posts, thst both use the WordPress loop but are distinctly different content types.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by Tony Zeoli.

BTW, the change to Gutenberg is a reaction to the adoption of page builders by the extended WordPress community and changes to the way sites like Medium present the content creation layer to the end user. Block based publishing is now where it’s at, whereas in the past, you published only in one large text field and used divs and classes to try to manipulate the content in a page to the preferred layout. Or, you used the text field for just a description, then added other data points using custom fields, which were already in WordPress before ACF. ACF just advanced the concept of custom fields with new features and functions that make custom fields far more useful to the lay person and easier for developers.

You can still modify and adjust your Gutenberg blocks with CSS in the Additional CSS section of your theme’s Customizer. But for all intent and purpose, you’re going to layout our your pages with a page builder or Gutenberg blocks, then style them accordingly with CSS.