How do I add extra content to a page, from the admin screen, but outside of the main content block? That’s a question you’ll eventually run into with many different CMSs. And it can be a pain.
While sometimes, you’ll be able to use a CMS that takes complex page layouts into account (such as Perch, Concrete5, ImpressPages, and the like), it’s not always an option. A massive percentage of the Internet is built on WordPress for a reason after all.
I’ve looked for different options over the years, usually settling on Multiple Content Blocks. But now, there’s a new contender, and it’s interesting.
Instead of adding an extra WYSIWYG editor to your pages, Page Parts creates sub-pages (essentially). They can have titles, excerpts, featured images, custom fields, all that good stuff.
You can manage all of them at once, or go to their parent pages, and manage only the “Page Parts”” associated with that page. You can sort them via drag ‘n’ drop, too.
But the kicker, for me, isn’t that you can add extra page parts and just call them in anywhere in your template. That’s cool, but not the best part. The best part is that you can define regions.
Yup, you set up two or more regions on a page, and you can assign as many of the page parts to those regions as your heart desires. And since you can call the page parts in with a sort of “loop”, it’s easy to style them as separate blocks of content.
You could make photo galleries, card-style blocks of information, or anything else you like. Failing that, you could always just use them to split up a very long document into more easily-managed sections. It’s a flexible system, with hundreds of potential applications.
The only thing that has disappointed me so far is the documentation. It really needs to be simplified, and clarified. It needs simple tutorials for getting started. But still, anyone who’s worked with WordPress code for long will be able to figure it out.
My conclusion: go for it.
