Canvas Docs

Finding Your Way Around The Editor

Canvas is built on the WordPress block editor, so everything you already know about blocks, the inserter and the settings sidebar carries over. What is new is the amount of control Canvas layers on top, and the first thing worth learning is not any single setting but where settings live. Every visual decision on a Canvas site is made in one of three places, and choosing the right one decides how far the change reaches.

A page or post opens inside its template, so the header, the footer, the content wrapper and any slider or hero the page assigns sit on the canvas while you edit the content in the middle of them. Judging a headline against the header above it is faster than switching to a preview to find out. To edit the content on its own instead, open the Template panel in the page's settings and turn off Show template; the editor remembers that choice and Canvas leaves it alone.

The Three Places A Setting Lives

Work out the scope you want before you look for the control:

  • Block settings apply to one block on one page. Select a block and its settings open in the sidebar on the right. This is where the block's own options live, along with the panels every Canvas block shares (see Shared Block Controls).
  • Page settings apply to the whole page you are editing. They sit in the panels on the page's own edit screen, alongside the document settings: Header Settings, Page Title Settings, Footer, Copyrights, Side Panel and Hero each override one piece of the site chrome for this page only. Almost every control in them starts on Global Default or Inherit, which means "do whatever the site wide option says", so an untouched page always follows the site.
  • Theme Options apply to the whole site. Find them under Canvas > Theme Options in the WordPress admin menu, arranged as tabs. A change here shows up on every page that has not overridden it, which makes it the right place for any decision you want made once.

The rule of thumb: want it everywhere, use Theme Options; want it on this page only, use the page's panels; want it on this block only, use the block's sidebar. When two of them disagree, the narrower scope wins, because that is what an override is for.

The Canvas Admin Menu

Installing Canvas adds a Canvas entry to the admin menu. It gathers the site wide tools in one place:

  • Dashboard shows the theme, plugin and license status at a glance, with shortcuts to the tools below.
  • Theme Options holds the site wide settings, one tab per area. The Theme Options reference documents every tab.
  • Header Builder, Top Bars, Mega Menus and Heroes each list one kind of reusable site chrome, built with blocks and assigned where you need it. The Site Chrome guides cover each one.
  • Performance, SEO and Typography are their own screens for speed, search and fonts.
  • Setup Wizard, Health Check and License cover first run, diagnostics and activation.

A few Canvas content types sit as their own entries in the admin menu rather than under Canvas: Side Panels and Popups, and the content heavy types such as Portfolio, Events, Sliders and Forms. Footers, Copyrights and Page Titles are managed from their Theme Options tabs, through the Manage Footers, Manage Copyrights and Manage Page Titles links, because assigning one is the same job as configuring the area it belongs to.

The Site Editor

Templates and template parts are edited in the Site Editor, under Appearance > Editor. You will rarely need it day to day, because the chrome you would normally edit there (the header, the footer, the page title band) is driven by Canvas records and options instead. Templates, Parts And Patterns explains the split.

Canvas records keep their own screens whichever route you came by. A header, footer, hero, slider or page title opens as itself, with no template around it, because each one is a piece of chrome that many pages share rather than a page of its own.

Pitfalls

Watch for these while you find your bearings:

  • A page panel you expect is missing. Several panels only register once there is something for them to do. The Footer and Copyrights panels appear only when at least one Footer or Copyright record exists, and the Side Panel panel appears only while Enable Side Panel is on in Canvas > Theme Options, on the Side Panel tab. Create the record or turn on the feature and the panel returns.
  • A setting you expect is missing inside a panel. Canvas hides settings that do not apply yet. A setting whose reference entry says "Shown when" something else is set is not gone, it is waiting for the control above it. Set that control and it appears.
  • A change in Theme Options does nothing on one page. That page is overriding it. Check the matching page panel and set the control back to Global Default or Inherit to hand the decision back to the site.

Read Templates, Parts And Patterns to see how the page you edit relates to the template around it, then The Canvas Block Library for a tour of what you can place on a page.

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