The Total theme includes a powerful custom built (for Total only) metabox that allows you to tweak multiple aspects of the current page/post. This includes, but isn’t limited to, disabling page elements like the footer, callout, top bar…etc, adding a slider to the top of the page, changing the page background and altering the footer callout content and button.
Often customers are using the Theme Settings metabox to simply change a specific page layout or disable the title on core pages such as the homepage. We recommend instead using one of the handy page templates for this.
In fact, for most websites we recommend going to the main Theme Panel and disabling the Theme Settings metabox as this is an older functionality that isn’t really needed for most sites!
Theme Settings Metabox in Gutenberg
If you are using the Gutenberg editor you will find the Total theme settings metabox at the bottom of the page like the screenshot below:
Theme Settings Metabox in the Classic Editor
If you are using the Classic Editor or a page builder like WPBakery you will locate the theme settings metabox below the editor like the screenshot below:
Important – Don’t use these Options on Many Posts/Pages!
While you can use these settings for multiple posts/pages it’s usually recommended not doing this because if you ever want to update all the posts/pages where you manually changed things it could be a hassle.
That’s why for many of these settings you will find options in the “Customizer“. Additionally ANY of these settings can be changed using a filter via your child theme. If you aren’t sure how have a look at the snippets to see if you can locate an example or ask and we can help write some custom code for your specific needs.
For example if you wanted to set a custom background or title for all the items in a Custom Post Type then you can use code for that via your child theme to do it automatically without manually changing the settings using the metabox.
The purpose of the Metabox is for making exclusive changes to a specific page or if you only have a few posts/pages you wanted to alter.
Adding/Removing the Page Settings Metabox from Post Types
If you are using our Post Types Unlimited Plugin plugin (recommended) for adding your custom post types and taxonomies you will find an option right in the post type settings to enable the settings metabox. However, if you are using custom code or a plugin you will need to use a snippet instead.
The following snippet is an example of how you can enable or disable the page settings metabox from specific post types:
// Define the post types for the main page settings metabox.
add_filter( 'totalthemecore/meta/main_metabox/post_types', function( $types ) {
// Add to my custom-type post type
$types[] = 'custom-type';
// Remove from blog posts
unset( $types['post'] );
// Return post types array
return $types;
}, 40 );Adding New Fields/Tabs to The Metabox?
It is possible to add new fields to the page settings metabox but for most cases it probably makes more sense to register your own custom fields.