There have been quite a few times where the question arises of how many layouts are possible with one of our themes. I chose RubySands to demonstrate the flexibility of a theme. It’s amazing how many different layouts can be created with the different placement of blocks and content. The framework is all there, just a matter of bringing everything together and making it work for you.

Use your blocks wisely

The placement of the blocks on your site help determine the type of layout you will have. Every block and containing div is flexible. So if on one page you have two preface blocks and the other you have three, the layout and blocks will adjust to properly fit the content. A three column layout is really a three column, two column (either first sidebar and main content or main content and last sidebar), or a one column layout. So right there you have four different column layouts…all from one three column theme.

The nice thing about blocks is that you have full control over when and where they are placed. For example you can have three preface regions and blocks in both sidebars of your homepage for a fully stacked content rich layout. Then for the subpages you can tone that down a bit to two preface blocks and one sidebar of blocks for a simpler layout. There are plenty of possible layouts in which you can manipulate, all without having to touch any code. Your theme expands and contracts to fit every possible layout configuration, so no matter what you throw at it the theme should hold up and work for you not against you.

Placing the blocks

So you might be wondering, “How do I place the blocks on different pages?” First you need to know which blocks you want to place on what pages. Once you have that figured out you can go to the block page (/admin/build/block) and select a block to configure. Click on the “configure” link next to the block’s title and then you are on the block configuration page.

Here you can edit your block’s title, visibility, and more. At the bottom of the page you will see a text area titled “page specific visibility settings”. This is where we tell the block exactly which pages we want it to appear on.

For this example I wanted my block to appear on only three pages. I clicked on the radio button titled “Show on only the listed pages”. This makes it so the block only appears on the pages listed below in the text area. In the text area enter the URL of the pages you want the block to appear on. I want the block to appear on the “About Us”, “Contact”, and “Blog” pages only so I entered their URL in the text area. Once you are done editing the block click on the “Save block” button below and your changes have been made.

Following these basic steps you can create many different layouts and configurations throughout your site. As you make changes your theme will expand and contract to suit the changing layout of the site.

Conclusion

On average our themes come with seventeen regions in which you can place your blocks in. That equals out to four different preface combinations, four different column (main content) layout combinations and four different postscript combinations. That’s quite a bit of flexibility right there considering that you can mix each of those combinations with each other. A different preface combination with a different column and postscript combination. The number of possible layouts continues to increase when you factor in the other regions that are specific to each theme such as the banner region (above the header), a header left or right region and even a couple of footer regions. There’s quite a bit you can do with flexible layout and these examples are just a quick outline of what is possible.