Salient Global Sections
Note: Salient Global Sections were added in version 13 of Salient. If you’re not seeing them available, make sure to update your theme and Salient plugins.
Let’s go over an example which highlights the utility of Global Sections.
For example, you want to add a call to action area above your footer that’s displayed site-wide. The old way would require you to manually add that to every page. While this might only be a minor inconvenience at first, the big problem will become evident when future edits need to be made. You would need to go back through every page and update the section accordingly.
Salient Global Sections fixes that by providing a way of easily managing templates in one location. Templates added within the Global Sections post type can be assigned to theme specific areas or added into pages via a page builder element. Changes that are then made to the core template within the Global Sections post type will reflect automatically in all other areas that the global section has been assigned.
Additionally, since the “Global Sections” is a standard WordPress post type, you can easily export/import templates you’ve made across different websites!
Getting Started
The Global Sections post type will be located under the Salient options panel your admin WordPress admin.
When accessing it for the first time, you’ll see a notice letting you know that the WPBakery page builder is not set for the post type yet. You can enable it by going to the WPbakery settings → Role Manager and selecting “Custom” for “Post Types”, and finally checking the “salient_g_sections” checkbox.
Theme Areas
The first way to utilize the templates you create through the Global Sections post type is directly inside of the Salient Options panel in the “Global Sections” tab.
This method is ideal if you’re trying to assign a section to every page within your site.
As of the initial release of Global Sections, there are two available areas to assign templates, which will be discussed below.
The After Header Navigation Section
This area will display directly after the header navigation bar and can come in handy for important announcements. The only caveat with using this theme area is that it will disable the “Transparent header effect” for your header navigation, if you have that theme option enabled.
The After Page Content Section
This area will display directly above the theme footer. It’s suitable for contact forms, newsletter sign up forms, call to actions and so forth.
You can even use the “After page content” area to fully replace your theme footer, if desired. This can be accomplished by coupling that area with the theme option to disable the regular footer. The theme option to toggle the standard footer is called “Main footer area”, and can be found in the Salient options panel → Footer tab.
Page Builder Element
If you don’t need a template to display on every page in your site, or just want more control on the placement, you can use the aptly named “Global Section” page builder element instead.
Simply assign the desired template to the Global Section element and it will pull the content from your core template.
