Rural Blog docsAll pages

Full width and narrow pages

Rural Blog gives a page two one-column widths:

Layout Width
Narrow (reading width) the narrow width — 620px out of the box
Full width up to the container width — 1170px out of the box

Both are set in Design → General → Widths, and chosen per page under Page layout.

Narrow is the default, and usually right

A page of prose — About, Contact, Privacy, a colophon — reads best at the same measure as a post. Widening it does not make it better; it makes the lines longer than the eye wants to track.

When to go full width

You may not need it

A narrow page can already break out. Any block that supports it can be set to Wide width or Full width from the block toolbar and will escape the reading column — see Wide and full width. One big image in the middle of a narrow page is a block alignment, not a layout change.

Use the full-width layout when the whole page is wide, not when one block is.

The landing-page combination

Set a page to Full width and tick Hide page title? in the Page options box, and the theme drops the content wrapper’s top padding to a thin step. The first block starts directly under the header.

This is the magazine-homepage case: no title, no sidebar, just blocks. Without the special handling you would get a band of empty space where the title used to be, which reads as a bug rather than as a design.

Typical recipe for a front page:

  1. Pages → Add New, title it Home.
  2. Page options: Layout → Full width, tick Hide page title?.
  3. Build the page — a Cover block first, then whatever follows.
  4. Settings → Reading → Your homepage displays → A static page → Homepage: Home.
  5. Point Posts page at a separate page called Blog, which will use your blog layout and display.

Widths are site-wide

The two numbers are global. Changing the narrow width to make one page wider changes every narrow post and page on the site. If you want a different width for one page, use the full-width layout, or constrain the blocks inside it with a Group block.