Overview
Templates are used to apply the same design to multiple pages. Think sitewide headers and footers, a layout for all blog posts or listings, etc. In conjunction with with dynamic data.
Template types
Templating lives in three admin screens — Oxygen → Templates, Headers and
Footers — and a template's Location decides which
kind it is.
| Type | What it lays out | Article |
|---|---|---|
| Single | One piece of content at a time — a post, a page, a product — with the parts that vary bound to dynamic data. | Single Templates |
| Archive | A list of content: a category, an author's posts, the blog index. A loop inside inherits each archive's own results. | Archive Templates |
| Search | The results page a visitor lands on after searching. | Search Templates |
| 404 | The page a visitor gets when the URL doesn't exist. | 404 Templates |
| Header & Footer | What renders above and below whatever the page shows, resolved separately from the content template. | Headers & Footers |
Managing templates
Templates live at Oxygen → Templates in wp-admin; headers and footers have their own
screens at Oxygen → Headers and Oxygen → Footers. Each screen is the same list.
The list shows every template with its Applies to location, a
icon in the Conditions column when it has conditions (hover it to read them), its
Priority, and an Active toggle.
- Active — switch a template off to stop it applying anywhere without deleting it.
The change takes effect immediately. - Hover a row for its actions: Edit in Oxygen opens the builder, Settings
reopens the title/location/conditions/priority dialog, Duplicate copies the
template with its settings, and Trash removes it. - Trashed templates live under the Trash button, where you can Restore them,
Delete permanently, or Empty Trash. - The search box filters the list by title.
The Headers and Footers screens are the same list, with the same row actions,
trash and search.
Create a template
- Go to Oxygen → Templates and click Add Template.
- Give the template a Title and choose a Location.
- Optionally add Conditions
and adjust the Priority, then click Add template.
Building the template layout
Click a template's name (or hover it and click Edit in Oxygen) to open it in the
builder. Two extra controls appear in the toolbar:
- Template: shows which template you're editing.
- Preview post: picks which real piece of matching content fills the canvas while
you design. Click it to search and switch between everything the template can apply
to — the canvas updates immediately. This only changes what you preview; it doesn't
change what the template applies to.
How Oxygen decides what renders
For every request Oxygen picks one header, one template and one footer, independently: in
each contest, every active entry whose Location matches and whose Conditions pass is a
candidate, and the highest Priority wins. The defaults already encode "specific beats
general", so you rarely touch the numbers — see
Location, Conditions & Priority.