Considerations for Theme Builder compatibility

Although Elementor Pro's Theme builder The feature can be used with any WordPress theme that adheres to WordPress coding standards, there are a few things to consider that can affect how well a particular theme will integrate with our Theme Builder.

If you are not sure if your theme is fully supported, please design your headers and footers together

If you decide to use Elementor Theme builder To create a header or footer, you should ideally use it to create both, rather than one or the other. If you prefer to use Theme Builder to create just the header but keep the existing footer of your theme, or vice versa, you want to use Theme Builder to design a new footer, but keep the existing header of your theme, you must submit this guide to the developer of your theme.

What is the developer guide about?

Elementor provides a theme locations API for theme developers. Although Elementor can edit headers and footers by default in most themes, it is still necessary that themes register additional locations to allow users to edit other theme components with Elementor Theme Builder. Theme developers can choose to support all, just a few, top placements, or even create their own custom placements. For example, if theme developers want to allow users to edit sidebars with Elementor, they can simply register the location of the sidebar through our API.

What could happen if you only design a header but not a footer with Elementor Theme Builder (or vice versa)?

WordPress theme developers often tie together header and footer code by opening a div in the header and then closing that div in the footer. If Theme Builder replaces the header but not the footer, or vice versa, the opening and closing tags may not match. If a tag is not closed, the structure of the code is broken and the page will also be broken.

Summary

Many themes have chosen to fully integrate Elementor placements into their themes. You can see a list of themes that have been specifically designed to work well with Elementor.

Elementor Theme Builder can allow you to replace headers and footers of almost any theme that has been written with the implemented WordPress coding standards. If these themes haven't yet used the Elementor Theme API to register Elementor locations, you should probably use Theme Builder to replace the theme's header and its footer at the same time. Replacing just one or the other with Theme Builder could cause your page to break.

However, if you design both your header and footer with Theme Builder, your newly designed header and footer will replace both the theme header and your footer code. This ensures that all the div tags in the header and footer will open and close properly, and your page will not break.

If you prefer to design just the header or just design the footer with Theme Builder, you should ask the theme developer to use our Theme Locations API to register locations. Similarly, if you want to use the Elementor Theme Builder to design other areas of the theme, such as the sidebar, ask your theme developer to register those locations as well, using the Theme Locations API.