Manual

The fundamentals of using Essential Grid.

Essential Grid Summarized

Essential Grid can both be quick & easy, and deep & robust. Let's summarize the core features that drive it.

Table of Contents

What is Essential Grid?

Essential Grid is a tool for creating beautiful galleries, aka grids, filled with just about any kind of content you can imagine, from images, to videos and audio, to social media streams, e-commerce products and more. 

It is in equal parts:

  • An efficient tool for quickly publishing beautiful ready-made grids.
  • A robust tool for creating your own custom grid designs.

Because Essential Grid is both of these things, this manual is going to start by showing you how to publish content super quickly using plug-and-play templates, then steadily walk you through the full set of features and available functionality.

What is a Grid?

Every grid created in Essential Grid is in essence made up of two things:

Let’s check out all the kinds of grid content you’ll learn to use, and all the aspects of grid design you’ll learn to work with. 

Grid Content

You can put Essential Grid to work showcasing content from several different sources, and this manual will step you through using each of them.

WordPress Post and Image Content

Create beautiful displays that draw from your blog’s posts, pages and custom post types.

Essential Grid is at heart a classic WordPress gallery, so naturally you can grab a selection of images from your WordPress Media Library to make a beautiful grid, perfect for tasks such as portfolio displays:

Social Media and Multimedia

Your visitors won’t need to leave your site to see all your social media and multimedia content in one place.

Show off your videos and audio from YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, Soundcloud or your own hosting:

Your images from Instagram, Flickr and Behance:

And your posts from Twitter and Facebook:

WooCommerce Product Displays

Highlight items from your WooCommerce store and add a product display to any part of your site:

Mix and Match

You don’t have to choose just one kind of content. Create custom grids and individually add pieces of content of any of the above listed types.

Grid Design

One half of working with Essential Grid is content, and the other half is the design. Let’s see the ways in which you’ll learn to use and create designs with Essential Grid. 

Ready-to-Use Templates

Get grids published in minutes by using one of our ready to use templates. Just pick a template, install it, tell it what content to use, and you’re good to go.

Customize or Design Your Own

Essential Grid is built for customization and creativity through the powerful Item Skin Editor.

Start with a template and make it your own, or create custom designs from scratch. 

Layout Variety

Setup grid layouts however you like.

Use boxed, full width and full screen layouts:

Example full width grid
Example full screen grid
Example boxed grid

Create even, masonry and cobbles item layouts:

Example even item layout
Example masonry item layout
Example cobbles item layout

And setup responsive layout variations for different screen sizes:

Example grid layout at three different screen sizes

Navigation, Filtering and Sorting

Add the ability to split a grid’s content into multiple pages and navigate between them:

And add the ability for viewers to filter and sort a grid by category, name, date and so on:

Animations

Decide how grid items should have their movement animated when they first appear, when they’re sorted or filtered, and when they’re hovered over.

Choose from dozens of in-built animation styles like zooming, fading, flipping, sliding and more. 

Next Up: Quick Demo Grids

Now you have a broad overview of Essential Grid, let’s jump straight into using it.

In the next section of the manual you’ll make three quick demo grids, each one taking just a few minutes.

When you’re done, you’ll understand the core process of creating grids, how to use templates, what content types are, and how to make three different types of grids. 

We’ll begin with the super fast: Grid Demo in Under 3 Minutes

Essential Grid Summarized