Create Single-Post Template
Last updated
Last updated
Kitify Theme Builder allows you to design your own single post template from scratch, no coding skills needed! In this tutorial, we will show exactly how to do it, so you can design your own beautiful blog posts.
First things first, yes, you still need a WordPress theme to begin with. Elementor doesn’t replace your theme but rather works alongside it, simply improving on this and that.
Also, don’t worry about losing your theme’s default single post template. What we’re doing here won’t delete any of your theme’s files. If you ever want to come back to that standard template, you can.
Before we get to work with Elementor, let’s make sure that you have at least one complete, representative post on your blog. Meaning, something that you consider an excellent example of what your average blog post looks like.
We’re going to use that post when previewing your new template. We’re doing that just so we get to work on some real content, instead of having to rely on half-empty posts.
With that out of the way, let’s begin building the template.
Go to Kitify → Theme Builder and click on the “Add New” button. Choose “Single” as your template type and click on “create template.”
When you see that pop-up with the templates to choose from, you can just click on “x” and close it. This will land you at the blank Elementor canvas.
At this stage, let’s hook up the preview to one of your live posts. For that, click on the preview icon in the bottom left corner, and then on Settings:
From the Preview Settings box set “Preview Dynamic Content as” to “Post” and then pick that one representative post of yours that I told you to prepare earlier.
This will populate the preview window with the post’s data.
Before we move onto the next step, here’s a quick look at the structure that we’ll use for our single post template:
As you can see, three main sections there:
(a) – the head section
(b) – the post body section
(c) – the comments section
We’re using this structure just to make things easier to grasp. Lumping everything together in a single section might be too confusing to follow.
Let’s now build each section one by one
The head section contains a handful of important elements:
the headline of the post
the author box – author image and biography
the post meta – publication date and category
the featured image of the post
All of those elements are quite easy to add, which you’ll see in just a minute.
Let’s start by adding a new single-column section.
Here are the settings I like to use for that:
I personally like to go for a minimal style that helps my content stand out on its own, so I tend to avoid any “flashy” elements.
As you can see, the only settings I’ve set are:
Content Width – Boxed
Width – 960px
I’ve found that to work well for my current theme. Of course, you can pick a different value, but let’s just stick with that for now. We can come back to customize the widths later on when we have all the elements in place.
If your theme forces some leftover background that doesn’t look right, you can also go to the Style tab and set the background color to white.
Kitify comes with some new content blocks that are going to be really handy when building this new single post template. Let’s start with the block simply called Post Title. Drag and drop it onto the canvas.
Here are the settings I’m using:
Content tab: Alignment – left
Style tab: Text Color – black
Style tab: Typography: Size – 65px, Weight – 600 (large fonts tend to work well for headlines)
Next, I’m adding a simple divider to add some visual separation between the headline and the rest of the head section.
Here are my settings:
This section is optional, so if you don’t want to showcase any author info or if you’re not using featured images on posts, you can skip to the next step.
However, I think that featured images and author info add a lot of personality to a blog post, which should help build a relationship with your readers.
Let’s start by adding a column block right below the divider.
Use the “33, 66” structure for the columns.
The column on the left is where we’ll put the author box. To do that, find a content block called Author Box and drag and drop it into place.
Here are the settings that I like to use for this block:
For the post meta, we’ll use a content block called Post Info. Drag and drop that one right below the author’s.
Here are the settings I use:
Finally, let’s take care of the featured image.
This one we’ll place in the right column. Find a content block called Featured Image and drag and drop it into place.
Here are my settings:
Of course, you are free to experiment with different image sizes based on the type of featured images that you use.
The complete head section in action:
Let’s start by adding one more standard single column section to the page.
Now the important part – the settings of the section. The only things I adjust are:
Content Width – Boxed
Width – 750px
Now, why the 750px? I want this to be roughly 200px less than the width of the first section (which was 960px). This will give me a nice, narrower look for the main content block as compared to the head section.
A trick like that makes the main content pop more and creates a nice visual break point between the head and the rests of the post. Here’s what I mean – what it’s going to look like when we’re done:
For the post content itself, we’re simply going to use a block called Post Content. After you drag and drop it into place, it’s basically good to go!
If you want to, you can experiment with the Typography settings to make sure that the text is clearly readable. You might not want to change the font itself, but rather experiment with Size and Line-Height.
One optional thing that I like to do is add some small social media buttons right above the main content of the post.
In this particular case, I do this by adding a new Columns block immediately above the post content. Then:
put a divider in the left column (you can clone the one you used in the head section of the template),
put a block called Share Buttons in the right column.
These are the settings that I use for the latter:
And here’s the final effect – the body of the post and the social media block above:
This is the final section of our new single post template.
The best way to get started here is to clone the previous section and then remove every content block that’s in it. That way, we’re retaining the main settings of the section, and it’s still quicker than starting from scratch.
Since now you’re pretty used to the process, let me just show you the specific blocks that I placed in this section:
(a) – Divider
(b) – Share Buttons
(c) – Divider
(d) – Facebook Comments
Here are the settings for the Share Buttons block:
And here are the settings for the Facebook Comments block:
If you prefer using WordPress native comments, no problem! You can do that by using the Post Comments block instead of the one for Facebook comments.
This is pretty much it when it comes to building your new single post template!
Here’s the final effect once again:
All that we have to do now is save it and tell WordPress to begin using it.
First, click that juicy “PUBLISH” button in the bottom left corner.
Elementor will ask where you want to display this new template. Setting this is pretty clever, and it works based on display conditions that you can assign. Don’t worry, this will all be clear in a sec.
Start by clicking on the “ADD CONDITION” button.
If you want your new template to replace the default template entirely then use the following setting:
Apart from that, you can customize this and assign your template to, say, only specific blog categories, specific tags, or even individual blog posts.
Here’s how you assign to a specific post:
Here’s how you assign to a specific category:
But there’s more. You can also combine conditions together. For example, here’s how you can exclude this template from a specific blog category while letting it show for all the other ones:
You can probably already see how powerful this conditions thing can be!
It basically allows you to have multiple single post templates for different occasions.
Once you click on the main “PUBLISH” button, your single post template will be enabled according to the conditions you’ve just set.
How easy was that?
