Layout Templates

The "Smpl" theme comes with various predefined layout templates. The purpose of this article is to help you better understand how they work with WordPress.

Sidebar Position on Pages & Posts

We've made it very easy to specify the position of your sidebar. You can set the default sidebar location under the theme options panel (located in the Appearance tab in your WP admin). You can also change this on a page-by-page basis. For example, if you wanted to insert a photo gallery in a Page or Post you might not want to show a sidebar at all. Below the editor box you'll see a dialog that allows you to specify the type of layout for the specific entry you are creating or editing.

Category Layouts

This theme has some more advanced layout options built in which allow you to customize the look of your site based on the category being viewed. By default the sidebar will appear in the default location setting described above. The category layouts available to you are 2-column, 3-column, and a simple alternate layout.

To make use of these layouts requires an FTP client. The edits are a cinch to perform but must be followed carefully. It's important to have a basic understanding of the WordPress Template Hierarchy. In short, this is the order in which WordPress looks for the template file to use when displaying a page on your site. By default, when displaying a category WordPress will look for category.php unless category-*slug.php or category-*id.php exists.

In the examples above, we have a file named category-2col.php and another named category-3col.php. This is because the Category Slug is named "2col" and "3col" respectively.

If you want to use a 2 or 3 column layout, just copy and rename category-2col.php or category-3col.php to category-yourslugname.php.