This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest three major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Blox Lite

Description

Blox Lite is nearing the end of its life. The plugin was built to solve a problem that will soon no longer exist. The advent of block themes utilizing the Site Editor has superseded Blox Lite. Critical support will still be provided in the support forum, but the plugin is no longer being actively developed.

Blox Lite allows you to easily customize your Genesis-powered website using content blocks. It is not a tool for changing the colors of your theme. While it can wrangle styles, think more along the lines of banner images, dynamic content areas, and custom footers. In other words, structural customization.

This plugin is only for Genesis Framework users. Genesis is a premium product of StudioPress, which has no affiliation with Blox Lite.

Features

  • Add content locally to posts, pages, and all public custom post types
  • Add content globally to virtually any page(s) on your website, including 404 pages, search pages, and archive pages
  • Position content anywhere with your choice of 50+ Genesis hooks
  • Display a custom image or featured image
  • Display HMTL content or add scripts, CSS, iframes, and even PHP
  • Includes utility shortcodes to help you add dynamic content
  • Add an unlimited number of content blocks
  • Plugin is fully translatable (.pot file included)
  • Multisite compatible

Content options

Blox Lite includes two content options, Raw Content, and Static Image. With Raw Content you can add anything to your website, whether that be raw HTML, CSS, Javascript, iframes, shortcodes, and even PHP. If you are looking to add images, such as a banner image, the Static Image option is the way to go. Add a photo directly from your media library, choose the size, add a caption, and more. The Static Image option even supports background images. This is great for setting up responsive headers or adding a parallax effect.

Removing content

As a general rule, Blox Lite allows you to add content. It does not remove existing content. For example, Blox Lite will easily allow you to add a custom footer to your site, but the old one will be there as well. To remove content, you will need to add the necessary PHP code to your theme’s functions.php file.

Style your way

Blox Lite does not include any styling aside from a small amount of default CSS for images, which can be turned off in the Settings. It is your site and we do not want to impose styling choices on you. Blox Lite will inherit most of your theme’s styling, but you will likely need to add some additional CSS. This customizability is an intended feature of Blox Lite and makes it all that more powerful. Simple questions about styling can be asked in the plugin’s support forum.

Screenshots

  • The Global Blocks admin screen
  • An example Global Block featuring the Raw Content content type
  • An example Local Block featuring the Static Image content type
  • The Blox settings screen

Installation

  1. You have a couple options:
    • Go to Plugins->Add New and search for “Blox Lite”. Once found, click “Install”.
    • Download the folder from WordPress.org and zip the folder. Then upload via Plugins->Add New->Upload.
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
  3. From the ‘Plugins’ page, head directly to the plugin ‘Settings’ page to configure your global options.
  4. Once the global settings have been set, navigate to “All Global Blocks” to create a new global block. To create local blocks navigate to a post, page, or custom post type, locate the ‘Local Content Blocks’ metabox and click the “Add Content Block” button. If you have any implementation questions, please post in the plugin support forum or check out this Getting Started Video.

Please Note: This plugin is only for Genesis Framework users. Genesis is a premium product by StudioPress. If you do not have Genesis 2.0+ or WordPress 3.6+, the plugin will not activate.

FAQ

What are the requirements for Blox Lite?

Blox Lite is a WordPress plugin that is designed for users of the Genesis Framework, which is a product of StudioPress. Therefore, a Genesis theme needs to be active for Blox Lite to work, and the site must also must be running Genesis v2.0 or greater. It is important to note that we do not have any direct affiliation with Studiopress.

In addition to Genesis requirements, Blox Lite requires at least WordPress 3.8 and a modern web browser. Blox is not compatible with the WordPress.com platform. You must be using a self-hosted version of WordPress to use this plugin on your site.

Is Blox Lite multisite compatible?

Yes, Blox Lite works flawlessly with WordPress MultiSite, both network activated and activated on individual sites.

Is Blox translatable?

Yup. Blox Lite has full translation and localization support via the blox textdomain and a .pot file is provided. All .mo and .po translation files should go into the languages folder in the base of the plugin.

Reviews

16 August 2021 1 reply
Nice successor to Genesis Custom Headers. This one works great. Thanks Nick
28 March 2021
I use super handy plugin on every site I build. It just works and it saves me so much time! No end to what you can do with this, but I use it for site banners all the time.
26 September 2020 1 reply
Author thought of everything. Love how simple it is to control where content is displayed. Thank you!
16 May 2018 1 reply
Blox is amazing. Hands down the most powerful Genesis Framework plugin I’ve ever used. It makes structural customization to any Genesis theme fast and easy. Love this plugin! Also, the pro version is worth every penny and support is top notch.
10 April 2018
This is a must have plugin for anyone using Genesis. I love the flexibility of being able to place content in any hook and more importantly, make that content easily editable by my clients.
Read all 27 reviews

Contributors and Developers

“Blox Lite” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Translate “Blox Lite” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Change Log

1.2.8 – 2019-06-23

  • Fixed conflict with Genesis 3.0

1.2.7 – 2019-05-08

  • Removed the blox post-type from showing up in search results

1.2.6 – 2018-12-05

  • Fixed WPML error

1.2.5 – 2017-05-05

  • Fixed bug that broke urls placed in the Custom Block CSS settings field

1.2.4 – 2017-04-10

  • Fixed bug inadvertently introduced by the quick edit bug fix in v1.2.3

1.2.3 – 2017-03-31

  • Fixed post type archive location setting bug where the global block would not display if multiple post type archives were selected
  • Fixed quick edit bug where the Local Blocks admin column would disappear on quick edit save
  • Fixed slideshow copy bug that caused issues with the caption include parentheses

1.2.2

  • Fixed local block count not displaying correctly in admin columns

1.2.1

  • Fixed location taxonomy bug

1.2.0

  • Added sortable admin columns
  • Added archive title utility shortcode
  • Added category and tag list utility shortcodes
  • Added toggle to better manage featured image on non-singular pages (i.e. front page, posts page, archives, etc.)
  • Fixed default CSS to render images full width on non-webkit browsers
  • Fixed custom taxonomy archive location bug

1.1.0

  • Added utility shortcodes, more to come…
  • Fixed bug with image link (Thanks nixiemartyn and skytthe!)

1.0.3

  • Added additional description text to Location settings tab
  • Added count indicators on taxonomies in Location settings
  • Fixed bug with PHP 5.2 (Thanks hampi52!)
  • Updated a few informational links in plugin

1.0.2

  • Fixed bug with Static Image caption stripping HTML tags (Thanks Nestor!)
  • Fixed bug with Featured/Custom pulling wrong featured image on non-singular pages (Thanks Nestor!)
  • Updated a few informational links in plugin

1.0.1

  • Fixed bug with PHP 5.3 (Thanks Tom!)
  • Updated a few informational links in plugin

1.0.0

  • Initial Release