Use Gridster to manage your content with ease in a customizable grid.
Gridster is a WordPress plugin that makes building intuitive draggable layouts from elements spanning multiple columns. You can even dynamically resize, add and remove elements from the grid, as edit the elements content inline.
You can fork Gridster at Github or tell me about your issues.
General - Features
- manage your contents within a grid
- drag & drop contents as gridster widgets from your last posts, pages or custom post types
- resize gridster widgets on the fly
- use custom templates for all your gridster-widgets, or per post_type
- override side wide settings for every gridster
- inline edit every content loaded via your templates
- images within your gridster-widgets are re-loaded on every resize of a widget, to best fit its dimensions
- add gridsters by simply adding a generated shortcode, you'll get from the gridsters post-list
- this plugin recognizes your defined content width from your theme and will help you create best fitting gridsters
- scripts & styles are loaded only if shortcode is really used, this saves load time
- visual shortcode replacement, like you know from -Shortcode
- TinyMCE Button to add gridster layouts with user-friendly GUI
- clean uninstall: all options, gridster-posts and related post-meta fields are deleted on uninstalling (not deactivation)
Templates
Adjust the HTML output of the gridster-widgets by overriding the default template from cbach-wp-gridster/views/gridster-default.php.
Just copy this file into a new created directory gridster-templates within your theme folder and change it to your needs.
Furthermore you can add different templates per post_type, when you create files like gridster-YOUR_POST_TYPE_NAME.php within these folder.
By using the later described gridster_locate_templates_from filter you are able to add more conditions to make your templates match more customized conditions.
Inline editing
With help of the Jeditable library it is possible to edit loaded content directly inside the gridster workbench.
So if you are using a post called "My grandmothers apple pie is the best", you could adjust the text inside your gridster-widget to shorter version, ie. "best apple pie" without editing the original post.
Just add some CSS class to the wrapper element, where your title will appear.
For editing single lines of text, like titles add class="gridster_edit".
If you want to edit texts in more comfortable textarea use class="gridster_edit-area"
Have a look at the /views/gridster-default.php inside the plugin directory to get a clue.
Screenshots
Create a new Gridster by dragging your content from the Lists of your posttypes left to the workbench on the right. (with WordPress 3.5.1)
Move the Gridster-Widgets around via drag & drop. Underlying Widgets are re-layoutet on the fly. (with WordPress 3.5.1)
Resize the Gridster-Widgets and get updated Images directly inside the workbench. The Plugin looks for the best fitting size according to your defined Thumbnail-Image-Sizes. (with WordPress 3.5.1)
After adding a new Gridster-Widget it is pre-populated with Title and Excerpt of the fetched post. Now you are able to inline edit theese texts, without the need to modify the original post. (with WordPress 3.5.1)
You have two different types of inline-editors: input-fields and textareas. Define the editable content blocks by customizing the Gridster-Widget Templates within your Theme. (with WordPress 3.5.1)
A list of all Gridster posts, also showing the Shortcodes. (with WordPress 3.5.1)
An embeded Shortcode inside the Editor is replaced by visual placeholder, to keep things easy for your editors. No need to write (short-)code. Besides it's possible to update, edit and delete the shortcode via icons, formerly known from the -shortcode. (with WordPress 3.5.1)
Style Selector with custom CSS classes, populated by the gridster_choose_from_custom_css_classes_for_widgets filter. And the frontend output with our custom classes appended to the WordPress post_class array. (with WordPress 3.5.1)
How can I customize the layout of the Gridster Widgets on the frontend?
There a some CSS classes you can use
.gridster-not-loaded is appended to the <body> element, when a shortcode is found on the current page.gridster-loaded replaces the former mentioned .gridster-not-loaded body-class, when Gridster Javascript is successfully loaded.gridster-wrap is the wrapper for the whole shortcode output.gs_w is the generic class aplied to every Gridster Widget
How to avoid the loading of `gridster_frontend.css`
The Plugin comes with minimal styling for the Gridster Markup, but maybe you’ll add theese few lines of CSS to your own theme stylesheet to reduce server requests.
Just set the constant GRIDSTER_FRONTEND_CSS to false in your themes functions.php file.
/**
* Do not use gridster frontend styles
*/
define( 'GRIDSTER_FRONTEND_CSS', false );
How to get best fitting image-sizes to work?
Gridster uses the generated images used as post-thumbnails by default. When you add existing content to a new gridster, the plugin will look for the best fitting image size, according to the width and height of your current gridster-widget.
So if you have defined the base width to 100px, base height to 100px and your margins to 10px, the plugin will look for images of 100 * 100 px.
Now, when you resize this gridster-widget to, let’s say, 1 row with 2 columns, the plugin will reload this gridster-widget with an image of 220 * 100 px.
To avoid ugly cropping or unwanted scaling of the post-thumbnails, you go best with defining some additional post-thumbnail sizes within your functions.php like so.
/**
* Add some additional post-thumbnail sizes, that can be used by the Gridster Plugin
* e.g. we have base-width: 100px, base-height: 100px and margins both 10px
*
* @see https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_image_size
*
*/
if ( function_exists( 'add_image_size' ) ) {
add_image_size( 'gridster-1col-1row', 100, 100, true );
add_image_size( 'gridster-2col-1row', 220, 100, true );
add_image_size( 'gridster-3col-1row', 340, 100, true );
add_image_size( 'gridster-4col-1row', 460, 100, true );
add_image_size( 'gridster-1col-2row', 100, 220, true );
add_image_size( 'gridster-1col-3row', 100, 340, true );
add_image_size( 'gridster-1col-4row', 100, 460, true );
/** ... and so on ... */
}
Do you have some question?
Drop me a line at gridster@carsten-bach.de
ChangeLog
1.4
- Tested compatibility with WP 3.6 – everything fine 😉
- Added support for new
shortcode_atts_{shortcode}-filter, introduced in WP 3.6; use it like this add_filter( 'shortcode_atts_gridster', 'YOUR-FILTER-FUNCTION-NAME' );
- Introduced a new filter to modify the HTML generated by the shortcode, use
add_filter( 'gridster_shortcode_output', 'YOUR-FILTER-FUNCTION-NAME' )
- Added two actionhooks, one before and one after the rendering of the shortcode output
- Fix for Activation-, Deactivation and Uninstall-Hooks
- Added a CSS id of the gridster-title to the shortcode output
- Fixed the “Edit this Gridster”-Link located upon the shortcode replacement, to work on post-new.php
- Removed PHP Notice
Undefined Property $widget->classes on line 2191
- “Insert Gridster” modal now recognizes to insert a new shortcode or to replace an existing one
- updated german translation
1.3.2
1.3.1
- Fix for not loading any posts (of all types) into there widget-blocks, because search was triggered with searchphrase “null”
1.3
- Added filter
gridster_overwrite_post_options_with_cap to define capability, which allows users to overwrite defaull layout settings for each gridster individually
- CSS adjustment of the Style selector width
- Fix for updating the height of the gridster element, during resize of gridster-widgets
- Fix for not being able to resize a gridster-widget below the very last row. Works now 😉
- Fix: Searchfield had value of “null”, if you did no search
- Removed meta_box for the post_slug on this post_type because we really don’t need it
- Fix for using “Return” on the searchform, to avoid the saving of the current gridster and relaoding the page
- Removed “Preview”-Link, “Quick Edit”-Link and option to password protect gridster-posts
1.2.1
- Removed some debugging code to avoid Fatal Error on activation in PHP < 5.3
1.2
- Added two CSS classes for
<body>, .gridster-not-loaded when shortode is used as a Noscript fallback and .gridster-loaded when JS is available and the Layout is loaded properly
- Fix to use Return key on search-fields inside the post-lists
- Layout improvements for showing the post_thumbnail inside the Gridster-Widget on the workbench
- Removed some debugging stuff from stable version
- Enabled line-breaks in editable HTML, marked with
.gridster_edit-area
- Fixed saving of wrong & unescaped HTML within the layout-seetings
- Added constant GRIDSTER_FRONTEND_CSS to disable loading of frontend stylesheet
- JSLint’ed all javascript files
- Added Style Select to add custom CSS classes to each Gridster Widget individually, select is populated by the new
gridster_choose_from_custom_css_classes_for_widgets filter and is not used by default
1.1
- Added TinyMCE Button to add shortcode
- Added visual shortcode replacement inside the editor, similar to the gallery-shortcode, with handle-buttons for changing the current shortcode, editing the related gridster and deleting the shortcode from the content
- Added Pagination to post-lists available as gridster-widgets
- Added Search to post_type blocks, to look for posts (and pages and custom post_types) usable as gridster-widgets
- Updated german translation
- Updated Icons
- Clean post_metas on post deletion
- Redirect Editor to workbench, if there are no gridster posts to show on /wp-admin/edit.php
1.0
