Canvas Docs

What Canvas Is

Canvas is a website builder for WordPress, delivered as two pieces that work as one: the Canvas theme and the Canvas Core plugin. Read this page once and the rest of the documentation will make sense, because almost every question about "where does this live" comes down to which of the two pieces you are looking at.

The Theme And The Plugin

The Canvas theme is a block theme built for the WordPress Site Editor. It carries the templates, template parts, patterns and styles that shape every page, and it registers the Canvas admin screens, from the Dashboard and Theme Options to the Setup Wizard and the License screen.

The Canvas Core plugin supplies the working machinery: the block library, the options system, the demo library, forms, sliders, portfolio and event content types, and the import tools. Without it the theme renders only the core WordPress blocks, so the two are designed to run together.

Canvas Core is never a separate download. It installs from inside WordPress once your license is active, either through the Setup Wizard or from a one-click admin notice, so there is no second ZIP to find and no version pairing to manage. How To Install Canvas Core walks through it.

Everything Is A Block

Canvas follows the Full Site Editing model. Headers, footers, page titles and page content are all composed from blocks, and every block exposes its options in the editor sidebar, so you change text, images, colours and behaviour from settings panels rather than from code. That is a deliberate contract: anything a visitor sees on a Canvas site is reachable from the editor. A page also opens inside its template, with the header, the footer and any hero or slider it assigns around the content you are editing, so what you work on looks like what you are publishing.

Site wide decisions live in one place, the Canvas > Theme Options screen, so a colour or layout choice made there applies everywhere the feature appears. Per page work happens in the block editor. The reference section of this documentation mirrors that split: one page per block, one page per Theme Options tab.

What You Can Build

Canvas is multipurpose by design, and the same building blocks assemble into different kinds of site:

  • Business and agency sites, from the header and mega menu builders down to pricing, testimonial and team sections.
  • Portfolios and event sites, backed by their own content types so the records drive the pages.
  • Online stores, through WooCommerce templates and a set of shop blocks.
  • Blogs and magazines, with post layouts, archives and category styling.

The fastest route to any of these is a demo: a complete ready made website you import in the Setup Wizard and then make your own. Free features work without a license; premium blocks, the demo library and updates unlock with one.

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