Making columns easier with Columnomatic

Kit Allen 10th of December 2015

If you want a job done, do it yourself.

Column layouts are pretty much the de facto standard of web publishing these days. Responsive layouts with two, three and four column grids are becoming increasingly common as a quick and user-friendly way of displaying content. But it’s never really been what WordPress does best.

There are a few options out there in terms of page editors – but in the main, we’ve found that they’re cumbersome and overly complex for users, and in a number of cases produce serious ‘code bloat’ (both in the maintenance system for admins, and on the front end code that’s displayed to users.)

A while ago, we blogged a wee video about our preferred option at the time – a plugin called Column Shortcodes. This was, until earlier this month, our preferred solution for columns – a custom shortcode system which features the flexibility to deploy a range of responsive column options right up to a six column grid. However, while there’s flexibility in spades, it’s still not the easiest for web admins to get their heads round.

So. If you want a job done, do it yourself. We got the development crayons out for an afternoon and sketched out a wish list for our system. We realised that in 90% of cases, we only ever use 2/3/4 column layouts, so we planned our system around this.

And here’s the result:

Our system gives you a true graphic representation of the page you’re editing, with columns and even fonts in place from the front end, so you can get a proper understanding of the content you’re working on. There’s three column options which can be added to any text editor with a single click – and we even added a Lorum Ipsum shortcut to speed up developing dummy page layouts.

The bad news is that it’s not available as a plugin – yet – it’s going through testing in our own code library before we release it to an unsuspecting world. But it’ll be available soon!