Reducing hero slots on page

[kevin davies]

Hi Bill,

I have built a rather bulky site using your home page layout on about 10 separate pages and was just wondering if it was possible to reduce the number of hero slots on a per page basis…?

If you could give me some pointers I would appreciate it.

Thanks,
kevin

[Bill Robbins]

Hello Kevin,

Good question. The way I prefer to reuse the home page template is to use along with a plugin called Content Aware Sidebars. The plugin will allow you to create new sidebar areas which you can use to replace existing ones. That way you can create a new sidebar area that corresponds to each section of the home page, for each page where you’ll use that template.

That way you’ll only have the widgets you want to use visible and no extra sections showing.

Give that a shot and let me know if you have any trouble.

Thanks,
Bill

[kevin davies]

Hi Bill,

I’ve been playing around with this plugin for a little while now but can’t seem to make it do as you say.

Can you give me a couple of pointers as to how you use it and the sidebar group contents please?

I know it will do what I need, I just can’t see how.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Bill Robbins]

Kevin,

The plugin does have lots of options. How I use it is I create a new sidebar for each home page widget area for each page where I’ll need to use the home page template again. Then I set the new sidebar to replace the default one for that widget block on that page. It’ll then show the widget from the new sidebar instead of the old.

If that’s not working for you, don’t sweat it. There are other options. The commonly installed plugin “Jetpack” has a widget visibility module in it. You can use it to make widgets visible only on the pages you choose. With that you could add multiple widgets to each home widget area and then select which ones are seen on which pages.

Let me know if you have any questions or if we’re talking about something different from one another.

Bill

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