About this plugin
Architect adds a theme builder to the free version of Elementor. Design your own headers, footers, single and archive layouts and popups with the regular Elementor editor, then choose exactly where each one appears on your site.
It works without Elementor Pro. If Elementor Pro is active, Architect steps aside and only its widgets and dynamic tags remain (see below).
Theme Builder
- Five template types: Header, Footer, Single, Archive and Popup.
- Display Location conditions, to include or exclude: Entire Site, Front Page, 404 Page, All Singular, Single of any post type, specific pages and posts, All Archives, Blog Archive, Search Results, Author Archive, Date Archive, post type archives, taxonomy archives and specific terms.
- Display Location has its own tab in the editor, a shortcut in the Publish menu, and a reminder when you publish a template that isn’t assigned anywhere.
- A Display Location column in Templates > Saved Templates shows where every template appears.
- Preview a Single template against any real post with Preview As and Apply & Preview.
- Page Layout (Default, Full Width, Canvas) and Hide Title settings for Single and Archive templates.
- Templates follow your translation plugin: WPML and Polylang are supported.
Popup Builder
- Entrance and exit animations, position, width, height, margin, background, overlay color and a styled close button.
- Triggers: on page load, after a delay, on scroll to a percentage, or on click of any CSS selector.
- Limit how many times a popup is shown to each visitor’s browser.
- Prevent page scrolling, close on overlay click or Escape, and close other popups first.
- Add the archt-popup-close class to any widget to turn it into a close button.
Element Display Conditions
Available on Elementor v3 elements.
- Show or hide any widget or container based on a custom field or a shortcode.
- Operators: equal, not equal, less than, greater than, empty, not empty, contains and doesn’t contain.
- Match all conditions or any of them. Conditional elements stay visible, and outlined, in the editor.
Custom CSS and Custom Attributes
Available on Elementor v3 elements.
- Custom CSS in the Advanced tab of your elements, with the selector keyword. The field is shown only to users who hold edit_css, the capability WordPress requires for its own Additional CSS editor, and what they write is sanitized when it is saved.
- Custom attributes per element, written as key|value.
Widgets
- Single: Post Title, Featured Image, Post Content, Post Excerpt, Post Meta, Post Navigation.
- Archive: Archive Title, Archive Description, Posts Loop, Archive Pagination.
- Navigation Menu: horizontal, vertical or expanded (sidebar) layout, dropdowns, hover effects, animations and optional schema markup.
Dynamic Tags
- Site: Site Title, Site Tagline, Site Logo, Site URL.
- Archive: Archive Title, Archive Description, Archive URL.
- Post: Post Title, Post URL, Post Date, Post Excerpt, Post Content, Post Featured Image, Post Terms, Pages URL.
- Custom data: Custom Field, Image Custom Field, Repeater, Shortcode, Author Meta, User Meta, Taxonomy Meta.
The post and custom data tags are shared with Better Post & Filter Widgets for Elementor. When both plugins are active, each tag is registered only once.
Compatibility
- Elementor v4: atomic widgets and Global Classes render correctly inside every template, and the widgets and dynamic tags work in both v3 and v4. Display Conditions, Custom CSS and Custom Attributes apply to v3 elements.
- Elementor Pro: when Pro is active, the theme builder, popups, Custom CSS and Custom Attributes step aside so nothing conflicts. The widgets and dynamic tags Pro doesn’t have remain available.
- Themes: on classic themes, only the theme’s site header and footer are swapped for your templates, so its page wrappers and layout stay intact.
Developers
Action hooks archt/header/before, archt/header/after, archt/footer/before and archt/footer/after let themes and plugins add markup around your header and footer. Filters are available for the blocked custom attributes ( archt/element/attributes/black_list ), the Custom CSS capability ( archt/custom_css/capability ), the archive title ( archt/core_elements/get_the_archive_title ) and the taxonomies offered by the Post Terms tag ( archt_taxonomy_args ).
The Navigation Menu supports the standard WordPress menu filters, such as nav_menu_link_attributes and nav_menu_css_class.
Documentation
Guides and the full list of settings are on the Architect documentation.
Contributing
Architect is open source and is developed in the open on GitHub. Bug reports, test results on your themes and setups, translations and code contributions are welcome, and more contributors mean more can be built. Features that are not in the plugin yet, such as WooCommerce widgets, are good candidates for contributions.