Toolset plugins normally work smoothly with any WordPress theme. You don’t need to do any editing on your theme’s code to use our plugins.

To understand better how Toolset plugins work on your site, have a look at what the different plugins do and how they are integrated with any WordPress theme.

Types – Sets Up Custom Types, Fields and Taxonomy

Types mainly works in the background of your site. It lets you define your own custom post types, fields and taxonomy. You can display that content using Views and Forms (without any PHP) or using your own code.

Controlling Third-party Custom Fields using Types, Forms or Views

Toolset allows you to control certain simple custom fields created using third-party plugins and themes. However, you cannot use Toolset Types, Forms, or Views to control complex third-party fields like serialized arrays, for example. Doing so will result in an unexpected and broken output.

If you need to use such complex fields and control them with Toolset, create them using Toolset Types plugin instead.

Potential theme conflicts with Types

There are no known conflicts between themes and Types. Any theme that respects the WordPress API and initialization sequence will work great with Types. If the theme includes Javascript errors, which load on every admin screen, it may cause some problems to Types GUI. This sort of critical error will also disrupt the rest of your site’s administration.

Views – Displays Content on the Front-end

Views displays any WordPress content (built-in content types and custom types that you’ve created) on your site’s front-end. You can display content with Views in several ways, including:

  • Content Templates, which override the page’s ‘content’ area
  • Views, which you can display using a shortcode
  • WordPress Archives, which let you customize standard listing pages

Views works smoothly with WordPress themes that use standard practices to display content. Any theme that’s coded according to the WordPress API, loads content using standard API calls and loops through content for archive pages will work flawlessly with Views.

Potential theme conflicts with Views

If themes bypass the WordPress API and render content directly, without calling the theme-API functions, some of Views features may not function. While it’s very difficult to cause Views to stop displaying, this is theoretically possible. Also, if themes disable shortcodes, you may not be able to display Views. Disabling shortcodes will render much of WordPress functionality useless, so this is a pretty theoretical concern.

Forms – Front-end Forms for Creating and Editing Content

Toolset forms lets you build forms for authoring WordPress content from front-end pages. Toolset forms display using shortcodes, so there is very little interaction with themes.

Potential theme conflicts with Forms

Since Forms only displays its content using shortcodes, any theme that works will work fine with Forms. If the theme outputs Javascript with critical errors, some Forms Javascript functionality will not work. In this situation, much of the standard WordPress front-end functionality will also not work.

Access – Control What Users Can Do

Access lets you set up custom roles and permissions. Like Types, Access works in the background. Access lets you modify the levels of roles that you create with it. If your theme creates its own roles, Access will not let you edit them. We implemented it this way, to prevent conflicts between hard-coded permissions in the theme and what you can set in the GUI.

Please note that if a theme or a plugin alters the WP_Query before Access does, that plugin’s query might break.

Potential theme conflicts with Access

It’s very difficult for themes to break Access functionality. As long as themes load correctly and use the WordPress initialization sequence, they will work smoothly with Access.

Post types created by third-party plugins and themes

Some WordPress plugins and themes control post types on their own. Usually, these post types are created by the plugin/theme itself and the capabilities related to it are also be managed by that same plugin/theme. Please note that Toolset Access will not work with these post types, created by third-party plugins and themes.

Layouts – Design Pages with Drag-and-Drop

Layouts lets you design your site using a visual drag-and-drop editor. There are two basic ways to use Layouts with a theme:

  • It can be used with any theme to design only the content part of your site. Things like the header and footer are still coming from your theme and editable only in your theme.
  • It can be used with themes that are Custom Post Types ready, where you still design only the content, but you can set options for each layout, coming from the Theme. For example, 
    Layouts uses the Bootstrap CSS to display on the site’s front-end.

Toolset Layouts is a page builder so it cannot be used together with other page builders like Elementor, WP Bakery, Oxygen, and others.

Potential theme conflicts with Layouts

If your theme customizes any of the native Bootstrap CSS classes, for example, a container, issues with applying the design created with the Layouts plugin can occur.

The Layouts plugin uses standard Bootstrap markup and any customization made by the theme on its classes and IDs will be lost.

For example, if a theme uses the !important rule to enforce its customization on Bootstrap classes, you will not even be able to use standard Bootstrap markup.

Providing support for issues that include themes which customize the native Bootstrap classes falls out of the terms of our support policy.

Problem with themes that do not use the_content() to render Post Body Content

When a theme does not use the_content or the_ddlayout to render the Post Body (the Content of the Post), Template Layouts and Content Layouts will not be applied to the Posts even if they are assigned. f you are using only Views you can resolve this issue with the use of Content Templates Theme Support but keep in mind that Toolset Layouts do not follow compatibility settings for Views.

To fix issues that arise when using Views and especially Layouts on a theme that does not use the_content or the_ddlayout you need to create a child theme. This child theme must at least replace the rendering template with which the Theme shows the Post Content. Within this template, you have to call the_content() or the_ddlayout() functions along with the parent theme settings and functions. Doing this will allow you to style the Posts with Toolset.