Creating a Design Set
Any Oxygen site can become a design set — a library other Oxygen sites can browse and pull
designs from. It takes one checkbox, and the site you already built is the set.
Step 1 — Turn the site into a design set
In wp-admin, go to Oxygen → Settings → Design Library and tick Turn This Website Into
a Design Set, then Save Changes.
A read-only Shareable URL appears under the checkboxes. That URL is the design set —
paste it into another Oxygen site's Custom Design Sets list and your designs are
available there.
Step 2 — Decide what the set offers
The remaining checkboxes describe what people get.
Full Site Import Enabled offers the site as a complete starting point: importers get
every page, header and footer in one step, from the wp-admin
Design Library screen. Ticking it reveals a
Thumbnail URL field — the preview image shown on your set's card. Point it at an image
of the site's home page, uploaded to your own media library so the URL is public.
Leave it unticked and your set is a UI kit: still fully browsable in the builder, just not
offered as a whole site.
Step 3 — Check what's in the set
Everything published on the site that was built with Oxygen is in the set: pages, posts,
and Parts. Nothing needs to be marked or exported.
That cuts both ways — a page you built as an experiment is in there too. Trash it or hide
it (step 5), and note that moving it to draft isn't enough: drafts still show up to people
browsing the set, they're only left out of the full-site import.
The design system travels with the designs. Your variables and selectors are offered
to anyone browsing the set, as a single Import Settings step, so the sections they take
look the way they look on your site.
Step 4 — Add Parts for pieces that aren't pages
A design set is more useful when it offers building blocks, not just finished pages — three
hero variants, a pricing table, a call-to-action band.
Turning the site into a design set adds a Parts post type for exactly this. Each Part is
one design, edited in Oxygen like any page, and appears in the set alongside your pages.
Find them in wp-admin at wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=oxygen_part, add one, then open it in
Oxygen and build the section.
Because they're a separate post type, Parts never show up in your site's navigation or
search results — they exist only to be browsed and copied.
Step 5 — Group items into folders
Items in the set can be grouped into folders in the browsing sidebar. Each post, page and
Part has a Design Library panel in the WordPress editor with two fields:
- Tags — one tag per folder. An item tagged
Heroesappears in a Heroes folder. - Hide in Design Set? — keeps that item out of the set entirely.
Use single-word tags. Tags are split on spaces as well as commas, so Call To Action
becomes three folders — Call, To and Action — rather than one.
Untagged items sit at the top level of the sidebar, which is fine for a small set.
Step 6 — Check it from another site
Take the Shareable URL to a second Oxygen site, paste it into Oxygen → Settings → Design
Library → Custom Design Sets, and save. Your set should appear in that site's builder
Design Library, with your folders, your pages and a live preview of each one.
That's the same view everyone you share the URL with will get. See
Sharing & Selling Your Design Set for
passwords, distribution and the licensing rules.
Troubleshooting
Your Parts return a 404
Parts get their own URLs, and the design set hands those URLs to other sites so they can
preview each Part. WordPress only learns those URLs when permalinks are rebuilt — which
doesn't happen automatically when you turn the site into a design set. Go to Settings →
Permalinks and click Save Changes once. No settings need to change; saving is what
rebuilds them.
A page you added isn't showing up on the other site
Other sites cache your set's contents for about a day. The preview of each item is always
live, but the list of items refreshes on a daily schedule.
The other site says the URL is an invalid design set
Check that Turn This Website Into a Design Set is still ticked and saved, and that the
site is reachable from the internet — a design set is fetched server-to-server, so a site
behind HTTP auth, an IP allowlist or a firewall can't be read even though it loads fine in
your browser.
You don't want the whole site in the set
Tick Hide in Design Set? on the pages you want to keep out, or move them to draft.
Drafts still appear in the browsing sidebar for people exploring your set, but the
full-site import only ever takes published content.