I'm creating an archive page for a CPT. I completed the design of the Archive Loop that displays all posts using Blocks. But I want to add a separate view above the archive loop so that I can display differently styled "featured posts". When I try to do this I get an error about not being able to add nested views. As far as I'm concerned I'm not trying to nest views, I want a separate view above the archive loop. On a standard post/page, I can add 2 separate views, one above the other, without any problem. But on an archive page I get the error.
Is there a way to have 2 views on an archive page? One that could display a selection of "featured posts" in one style, and then display remaining posts in another style?
Thank you for contacting us and I'd be happy to assist.
Your observation is correct and currently, it is not possible to create a new view inside a WordPress Archive edit screen.
A workaround can be to create the desired post view on a separate page and once it is ready, you can insert it in the WordPress Archive as an existing view through the "Views" block.
Thanks, that has helped. There is an issue though, the archive loop(Remainder) is a 3 column grid and the standard(Featured) view above it is supposed to be a 1 column grid. But as you can see at the link above, the standard view (Featured posts) is displaying as a 3 column grid on the front end even though it's set to 1 column and appears as 1 column in the back end.
I also tried adding a full width (1 column grid) post slider to the bottom of the archive...
hidden link
But as you can see, it too is stuck as a 3 column grid.
I thought maybe the 2 views were tied to the archive's layout, a 3 column grid. But I found that I can successfully change the grid for the archive, to 5 for example, but the 2 views remain as 3 column grids.
Really need help solving this...
By the way, I keep getting an error message when trying to post here in the support system... "ERROR: Are you sure you wanted to do that?"... and my post doesn't show up.
Thanks for writing back and for sharing these details.
I was able to reproduce this behavior on my test website too. If the View and Archive on a page are both using the grid loop output style, the view's number of columns is not consistent with what is set in its settings.
We appreciate you brought this forward and I've passed these findings to the concerned team for further review.
For now, you can use some custom CSS code to make sure that the featured posts on the top are shown in a single column:
( you can include this CSS code in the Archive's "Custom CSS" field - screenshot: hidden link )
If you check the page again, I think you'll see that the bottom slider is now stuck in 3 column layout instead of 1. I think it switches back and forth from 1 column to 3 column depending on what was the last page saved... the archive(which changes columns to 3) and the page where the view was created(which changes the columns to 1).
Before closing the ticket, I just wanted to report that there were also other bugs related to this I think.
For example, inside the 1 column grid view, I added a Container and set it's max-width to 50% and placed a Heading block inside it. When displayed on the front end, the Container stretched 100%. I could not get the container to be 50% of the width of it's parent Grid Cell.
So I tried removing the Container and replaced it with a 2 column Grid and put a Heading block in the left Grid Cell in hopes of getting a 50% width. This failed as well as the left Grid Cell stretched 100% across the width of it's parent Grid Cell.
So anyway, there appears to be several spacing/alignment/width issues when inserting a View into an Archive page.
I had to use non-Toolset blocks to achieve the layout I wanted, even though the Toolset blocks should have been adequate.
Any grid block elements inside the view would be affected by the custom CSS code that was added for the view's grid loop columns. That could have been fixed by making that CSS code more precise. But it is fine if you've used different blocks for now.
