We’re exposing the 5 biggest secrets of ProPhoto 7 to help you get a head start on your brand new website!

#1 – Selecting multiple rows or columns to save time

When editing rows or columns in any block’s settings area, you can select multiple at a time by holding down command or control on your keyboard and then mouse clicking the other columns or rows. The columns or rows will show up blue when multiple are selected in the settings box.

This allows you to control things like padding for multiple items at once, it can also save time when building out designs.

#2 – Display custom excerpt text for blog posts

If you have your blog to display excerpts instead of the normal posting method, did you know you can customize the text specifically? You can do this in WordPress 5’s new block area for each post you make.

In WordPress, edit a post you’ve made and then click on the “document” tab in the post editor.

Next, you’ll want to scroll down the WordPress sidebar, and find the “excerpts” option. There, you can type in your custom text.

If you have excerpts turned on for your blog posts in ProPhoto 7, then it will automatically pull that custom excerpt text from your post, instead of using the default! This is extremely helpful for SEO if you want it to pull specific text from your blog post and have it show up on your front blog page.

We also feel it makes for a nicer, cleaner blog design by not having the excerpts be automatically truncated.

#3 – The mobile slide over isn’t just for menu text.

The mobile slideover block isn’t just for mobile menu text, did you know it works like any other block in ProPhoto 7? You can easily add your logo, the menu text, and social media icons to the mobile menu now! In fact, you can drag and drop any type of ProPhoto module into the slideover if you wanted to.

Don’t let that stop you from coming up with some great ideas, you could easily add a subscribe button, or an important CTA to get your mobile visitors attention!

It’s a great feature since previous versions of ProPhoto left the mobile menu out into the cold. We definitely don’t advise stuffing your mobile menu with lots of graphics, but you can do some more unique things with it in ProPhoto 7!

#4 – Custom Blog Post Headers

Did you know you could have a custom image show up on every single blog post in ProPhoto 7? Almost all our designs use this method to give you a bit more flexibility.

You only ever have to create the layout once, and not for every single post you make. ProPhoto will automatically do the work for you!

Here’s an example of what that would look like in our Athena ProPhoto 7 design. In this example, our blog post is pulling the image we uploaded to the post as a background header image.

You don’t have to make it pull the first image in the post either, you can upload any image and the ProPhoto 7 featured image setting will pull the image you’ve uploaded.

First, in your WordPress post, upload a featured image. If you don’t upload an image, when ProPhoto tries to pull the featured image then it will show up blank.

The first step is to either create a blank layout to work with, or we suggest just copying one of your other layouts included with your design. The easiest would be the blog layout, since the single post page will require a wordpress module to work.

In the screenshot below, we’ve gone ahead and copied our blog layout, renamed it to “blog single post layout” and we’re going to assign it to all individual posts.

Once your layout is assigned, go ahead and start customizing it. The blog layout you copied can remain exactly the same! All you need to do is add a new block to the layout and make the following changes:

Go into the blocks settings and be sure to turn on the setting that says “use featured image when available”. You can access any of the blocks settings by hovering over the block in the visualizer and clicking the green settings icon.

When you make a WordPress post now, the block will automatically pull the image that you’ve uploaded to your WordPress post.

Tip: You can adjust the block’s top and bottom padding to adjust the height of the block overall. This exposes how much background image you see.

The next step is easy! Simply drag and drop a “Header Module” to bring in the title, and post information.

Now the block will automatically pull the WordPress post meta data like the post title, date and categories if you have them turned on. You can adjust all that and more by clicking the settings icon for the header module you added including the font styles.

This is a unique under-utilized featured in ProPhoto 7. This means you could have a custom header for every post, you can also get pretty creative with how you want the header to each post to look like.

#5 Built in Instagram Widget

Most people miss this one because it’s not it’s own module. It’s wrapped up into the ProPhoto grid module.

You can add a ProPhoto grid module to any layout and change the grid type to instagram. You’ll have to authorize it so Instagram can display, but Prophoto’s built in method gives more options than people think. You can change the size of the grid, how many items show, whether or not it shows the caption and more.

One little instagram grid secret is to create your own grid style for just the instagram grid. This allows you to have it’s own hover color and font style colors, adding even more customization to the instagram grid.

With the built in option it saves you from installing an additional plugin and gives you a little more flexibility built in to create the site you always wanted.

These are just some of the 5 biggest secrets in ProPhoto. ProPhoto 7 has tons of features to explore that we didn’t include in our list. The tiles feature deserves it’s own post since you can build a large array of graphics or custom buttons with it, and there’s also custom grids and more.

If you’re ready to explore more, get $20.00 off ProPhoto 7 by using code LALUNE at checkout (or just tap here.)