Layout Now

Description

Layout Now turns your posts into polished, modern layouts in about a minute. Pick a layout, choose a skin, fine-tune it with a few smart controls while you watch a live preview, then drop the shortcode anywhere.

Four layouts

• Bento Grid — a large hero card with smaller tiles packed around it. Four patterns that always fill the grid without gaps, even when a category has only a few posts.
• Edge-Peek Carousel — a swipeable row where the next card peeks in from the edge to invite scrolling. Native touch scrolling, with optional arrows and dots.
• Infinite Marquee — a continuous, auto-scrolling stream of cards with softly faded edges. Pauses on hover and focus, and includes a pause button.
• Instant-Filter Grid — a clean grid topped with category or tag pills. Clicking a pill filters and animates the cards into place without reloading the page.

Skins and smart controls

Four skins — Clean, Midnight, Editorial and Cinematic — work with every layout. One-click presets change the whole vibe at once, and stepped controls (corners, spacing, hover effect, image ratio, title size, width, light/dark/auto mode, accent color) keep every combination looking designed.

Fast and theme-proof

• Loads nothing on pages without a layout. Each page loads only the CSS of the layouts and skins it actually shows, plus a tiny script (2–3 KB) for interactive layouts. The Bento Grid needs no JavaScript at all.
• No jQuery and no slider libraries.
• Layouts respond to the space they are placed in (container queries), so they look right in a full-width section or a narrow column.
• Scoped styles protect layouts from aggressive theme CSS, so they look the same on any theme.
• Post queries are cached and refreshed automatically when your content changes.

Accessible

Keyboard and screen reader friendly: real links and buttons, labelled carousel regions and slides, announced filter results, a pause control for moving content, and full support for the “reduce motion” system setting.

For developers

Data sources, layouts and skins are registered through the layout_now_sources, layout_now_layouts and layout_now_skins filters. Templates can be overridden with the layout_now_template filter, and post queries adjusted with layout_now_posts_query_args.

Source code

The admin app is built with @wordpress/scripts. Its human-readable source is included in the plugin at admin/src. To rebuild it, run npm install and then npm run build in the plugin folder. Frontend scripts and styles in assets/ are not compiled.