Multiple pages with "home-sections"

[Alberto Brusa]

Dear Bill,

Would it be possible to have a site with various pages with customisable “home-sections”?
I believe than by duplicating the home-page-widgets and the home-page-options it could be attained without the need to install elite in sub-directories (which would easily make different home-pages one per site).

Best regards,
Alberto

[Bill Robbins]

Hello Alberto,

Excellent question there. It can be done. For the widgets, you’ll want to use the Widget Visibility Module that’s part of the Jetpack plugin. It lets you specify where a specific widget appears (by page, post, category).

What you can do with that is create multiple pages using the home page template. Then you’ll add all the widgets you’ll need to each of the home widget areas. Then you can use the plugin to specify where each of those widgets can be seen and where they will be hidden. That takes care of the content.

The slightly trickier part is the styling like the backgrounds. I would suggest using an old plugin called Art Direction. You’ll see a notice saying it hasn’t been updated in two years, but it does still work to the best of my knowledge. What the plugin does is allow you to add styling on a per page/post basis by adding a box below the main content box of your page where you can add in CSS styles.

So instead of using the home page options that are part of the customizer you’ll add the styles to each page using the plugin.

The easiest way I can think of to create the styles is this:

1. Make your page and customize it using the theme options/customizer.
2. View the page in your browser. Using your browser, view the source of the page. In the source code you’ll see several sections that look like this:

   
   #home-one,
   #home-one .widget,
   #home-one h3.widget-title { color: #1a1a1a }
   																								
   #home-one { background:  #ffffff    ; }
   

3. Copy each of those out of the page and add them to the CSS box that the plugin has added to your edit page screen.
4. Update your page after that and then remove the styles from the theme options.
5. Repeat that for all the pages.

It’s not as clean of an option as I’d like to give you there, but that should do the trick. If you have any questions, let me know.

Have a great weekend,
Bill

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