Catalyst Custom Page Options Combined

In the last two Feature of the Week posts I’ve been looking at the flexibility that the Custom Page Layouts in Catalyst Theme provide when designing a site.

In this post I’m going to extend that look a little further to show how the Custom Page Layout, Custom Widget Area and Custom Hook Box options in Catalyst Advanced Options all tie together to give an enormous amount of flexibility.

In the first of the previous posts, I showed how Catalyst lets us create a Custom Layout with its own sidebar arrangement assigned to it, with the widths for each of the content and sidebar areas specified uniquely for that layout if required.

And because the sidebars for each Custom Page Layout are unique to the Layout involved, we also saw how widgetized content could also be applied on a per Layout basis allowing Layouts that are otherwise identical to display their own unique widget content etc.

Then, in the second of the posts, I showed how we can apply Custom Page Layouts on a hierarchical basis in the Catalyst Theme.

This lets us apply a Layout with a granularity ranging from site-wide at the highest level, to all Posts, or all general Pages, or all Category Archives etc… all the way down to just an individual Post, Page, Category or Tag Archive at the lowest level…

It means you can apply one Layout to the whole site say, except for the Category Archive Pages which can all follow a different Layout, and in turn, except for one Category which can have its own particular individual Layout applied to it.

We can now extend this flexibility even further with the other functionality available in Catalyst Theme’s Advanced Options such as Custom Widget Areas and Custom Hook Boxes.

When we create and add a Catalyst Custom Widget Area we are specifying an area that will appear in the WordPress Widgets option – WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets -  and like the sidebar widget areas etc, we can drag whatever widgets we want into that Custom Widget Area.

A Custom Widget Area can be ‘Hooked’ into a specific place in the Page structure using the drop-down selection menu.

In the example below, I’ve created a Custom Widget Area called ‘header_right_area’ and attached it into the ‘catalyst_hook_header_right’ hook (it’s also possible to include a Custom Widget Area anywhere on a site using the Catalyst Shortcode option, but that’s another story of flexibility and power provided by Catalyst!!).

What Catalyst Theme also allows us to do is specify which Page Layouts will include that Custom Widget Area.

As shown below, it has been included in the EZ Static Homepage Layout (a Custom Layout that I created previously).

Now when we look at the Widgets option in WordPress > Appearance > Widgets, there will be a Widget Area called ‘header_right_area’ into which we can drop widgets.

They will only appear on Pages and Posts which have been assigned the Page Layout ‘EZ Static Homepage’.

The Page shown here is assigned a different Layout, so the widget area (and its widget content) doesn’t appear here.

But the next Page has been assigned the Custom Page Layout concerned and so it does appear on this one.

This gives you amazing and, importantly, easy flexibility when designing a site to enable certain content to only display on chosen pages throughout the site.

All that has been done without the need for any coding, because that’s just how easy Catalyst Theme makes it!

Have fun.

David.

David Pritchard is the author of the Catalyst Theme Cheat Sheet – the 250+ page guide that helps users make the most of Catalyst Theme. Licenced Catalyst Theme users can get their FREE copy in the downloads section of the Catalyst Theme forum. David also has a site with guides to using Catalyst Theme, WordPress, SEO, internet marketing techniques and other topics at http://www.FastStepInternetMarketing.com