The Grid Review: Create Custom Grid Layouts to Display Your Content

The Grid is a WordPress plugin that gives you more options for displaying your content on your website. Therefore, if you’re looking for creative ways to present your content, be sure to read this The Grid review.

The Grid gives you the ability to create custom grids that display a range of content in different layout formats. This content could include your posts, pages, media files, ecommerce store products, and social media content. In this The Grid plugin review, we’ll be exploring exactly what this layout builder can do.

By the end of the review, you’ll have all the information you need to help you decide whether The Grid is the right plugin to help upgrade your WordPress website.

What Can The Grid Plugin Do?

To give you a better idea of what The Grid can do, let’s start with a quick overview of the process of creating a custom content layout.

Choose a Content Source

When creating a grid layout, the first step is to choose the source type. This is the type of content that will be displayed inside the grid layout. Options include WordPress content, hosted videos, and social media content.

Create Content Rules

The next step is to choose how many items to include in your grid. You can also set up any filters for excluding or including specific pieces of content.

Choose a Grid Type

After configuring which content will be included, you can choose a grid type for the layout. The Grid has some great controls for defining how your layouts will be displayed on smartphones, tablets, and other devices.

The Grid also includes the Grid Composer, a builder tool that gives you some control over which elements are included in your layout.

Select a Skin

Next, The Grid enables you to apply a pre-built skin to your layout. The Grid skins are pre-built designs that can be used to give your layouts a stylish look.

When choosing a pre-built skin, you can quickly customize some aspects of it. These customization options cover the overall color scheme and individual colors used by your chosen skin.

The Grid also has a skin builder for carrying out more advanced customization work or creating your own skins for use throughout your site. We’ll look at the skin builder in more detail in the features section of this The Grid review, but if you’re wondering if you can create custom designs for your grids, the answer is yes.

Choose an Animation Effect

Once you’ve chosen a skin, you have the option of applying an animation effect. These animation effects are used when the grid content is first displayed and can be a nice way to enhance your layouts.

Publish Your Custom Content Grid Layout

When you’ve finished creating your custom content grid, it can be published on your site by inserting the corresponding shortcode into a post or page.

The Grid also adds a control panel to the WordPress Editor screen. This gives you the ability to edit the current post format settings and its appearance. These settings  cover the color schemes and content, depending on the post format.

You can also set grid layouts as templates for use by your theme. Now instead of being limited by the layouts included with your WordPress theme, you can use The Grid to display custom layouts that contain your website content as well as content from external sources.

The Grid Review: Features and Capabilities

Hopefully, you now have a good idea of what The Grid can do as well as some ideas for how you could use this plugin on your WordPress website. To understand the full capabilities of this plugin, let’s explore its features next in our The Grid review.

Create Custom Grid Layouts

As mentioned, the core purpose of The Grid is to help you display a range of content on your WordPress website using custom layouts. Posts, pages, custom post types, post formats, products from your store, and media files can be displayed. This plugin also enables you to display social media content in your grid layouts.

The Grid Demo Layouts

The Grid comes with a number of demo layouts to help you get started. These demos are all ready to go. However, you can easily customize them to better suit your needs.

Content Grid Layouts

Creating a layout that displays your posts in a stylish grid is a perfect job for this plugin. The Kampala skin demo that’s included with The Grid plugin will display a stream of your latest content in a mobile responsive masonry grid layout.

Media Grid Layouts

Another good use for The Grid is to display content from your WordPress Media Library in an interesting layout. The source material for this type of grid would include images that are hosted as part of your WordPress website.

Depending on how you configure your grid layout, it could simply be used to display content from your media library. Alternatively, clicking on an item could display it in a lightbox window.

Enabling the lightbox feature, allows your visitors to scroll through the items in your layout directly from the lightbox window.

Content Sliders

The Grid also has a slider feature. Thanks to this, you can easily display your media items and other content in a responsive slideshow format.

Social Media Grid Layouts

The Grid now gives you the ability to display content from social media in your layouts.  If you choose this type of source, you get a good amount of control over how that content is selected .

When using Twitter as a source for your layout content, you can display the latest tweets from a specific user. Other options include displaying tweets by search terms, user favorites, and using a user list.

When creating a grid layout to display content from Instagram, you can enter multiple users as the content source. You can also use multiple hashtags to control which Instagram posts are displayed in your layouts.

Ecommerce Product Grid Layouts

If you want to upgrade the product displays for your online shop, The Grid is fully compatible with WooCommerce.  This gives you an easy way to create custom layouts that help promote your products on your site.

Drag-and-Drop Builder Interface

The Grid comes with a good selection of layouts and skins for your grids. However,  the plugin also includes a drag-and-drop grid builder. Thanks to this, you can not only edit the included skins and layouts but also create your own from scratch.

The layout builder governs what elements are displayed where, such as the filters, pagination buttons, and sorting tools. The skins are used to control the appearance of the grids.

Through the skin builder, you can create the custom designs that are applied to your grids. You can also edit any of the demo skins included with The Grid.

The skin builder is a powerful tool. It gives you a great deal of control over how your layouts are presented. However, as the demo skins are all very high quality, you might not ever need to use the skin builder.

Online Documentation

The Grid plugin also has extensive online documentation. Thanks to the support material and guides, you should have no trouble getting the most out of this plugin.

The Grid Pricing Information

The Grid is available from the CodeCanyon marketplace for $25. This price includes lifetime access to plugins updates and six months of support from the plugin developer. You can extend this support period to 12 months for an extra $7.

Final Thoughts

The Grid might sound like a complicated tool. But in fact, it’s very simple to use.

The first step is to choose the type of content you want to display in your grid layout. Then choose a grid type, such as masonry or justified. After that, you can choose a skin or design for your grid before it’s ready to be published on your site.

I’ve left out a few steps, such as filtering your content or defining what happens when a user clicks on an item. You can also use the layout and skin builders to customize how your content is displayed. However, if you don’t need that degree of control, the prebuilt skins and layouts included with the plugin should be more than enough for most projects.

The Grid is a powerful, yet easy to use tool that makes presenting your content in a range of stylish and interesting ways very straightforward. If your WordPress website needs a presentational upgrade, The Grid is a cost-effective way to quickly transform its appearance and make it easier for your visitors to find your best content.

Find out more about The Grid today