Reply To: Can Flexible Content Be Used As Page Layout Builder?

• oxygensmith

• February 5, 2018 at 12:45 pm

I’m making a pretty rudimentary one with Flexible Content. I’m making it easier for the end users to make similar layouts by loading a lot of the functionality into shortcodes, and then making TinyMCE buttons for the shortcodes that prompt them for options. So: user lays out flexible content rows, hits buttons to add shortcodes to the rows and columns in the layout they’ve chosen, and the shortcodes produce galleries or post listings or whatever.

I came up with this when I was originally going to use Divi (a page builder type of plugin and theme) for a particular website until realizing that plugin didn’t scale well at all. The one thing Divi really has going for it are custom pre-fab layouts you can load up, and the ability to create libraries of repeatable content. So my shortcodes, combined with some ACF fields applied to Site Settings, accomplish about 80% of the same thing, but without all the Divi headaches/limitations.

I agree with Anu’s solution for loading up prefigured layouts. It’s better to have custom fieldsets attached to page templates.

But I think I’m making a decent freeform editor with FC. It just doesn’t get auto-populated.