When you open the Thrive Dashboard, you will see that there are two main sections:
- Your Installed Products
- Thrive Features
The “Your Installed Products” section will include the currently installed and activated Thrive Suite products and the “Thrive Features” one will behold various cards with different sections from where you can customize your site.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the “Global Elements” section and see how you can use the available options.
What are global elements?
Global elements are those elements that you can customize and save, so that you can re-use them later, on the same page, or on different pages, without having to customize them all over again.
Some examples of global elements include templates, symbols, blocks, headers and footers.
To access the section, access your Thrive Dashboard from the left sidebar of the WordPress admin dashboard:
The dashboard will open, look for the “Global Elements” card and click on “Manage Global Elements”:
The “Global Elements” dashboard will open:
And there are 5 main sections here:
Content Templates
The “Content Templates” are the templates that you can save and customize from the Thrive Architect editor, by hovering over an element and clicking on the “Save” icon:
And then, you can go ahead and enter the details of the new Content Template and save it:
Once you do that, you will be able to find the template in the “Content Templates” section of your Thrive Dashboard:
If you haven’t assigned any categories to the template, it will be listed under the “Uncategorized templates” section.
If you want to sort them by category, you can create new ones by clicking on the “Create A New Category” button:
A pop-up will open and you can set up the new category by entering a name and clicking on “Save” when finished:
And you can then assign the newly saved templates to this category:
Please check out this article for more information about the “(Content) Templates”:
Symbols & Blocks
The next section of the “Global Elements” dashboard is the “Symbols & Blocks” one and it works very similarly to the previous one.
Here, as well, you are able to create categories for the Symbols/Gutenberg Blocks that you decide to save for later use.
What is the difference between “Symbols” and “Templates”?
If you are not sure whether you should save your element as a “Template” or a “Symbol”, check out the differences between them:
Although both of them are saved the same way, the difference lies within the way you can use them on other pages.
- Let’s say you have saved a “Template” and you load it on ten different pages. The changes you make on one of the pages will not be applied to the rest of the pages, where the “Template” can be found. The modification will only affect the instance/page you have applied it to.
- However, if you do the same thing with a “Symbol”, meaning that first you save an element as a “Symbol” and then, you load it on ten different pages. After that, you apply changes to it on one of the pages. Those changes will be visible on all ten pages where the “Symbol” was used on.
To sum up, “Symbols” are synchronized (change one and all of its instances will change as well), while “Templates” are not synchronized (need to be customized on every instance).
You are able to create a new symbol or category directly from here, by hovering over “Create New” and choosing the suitable option:
Creating a new symbol
If you want to create a new symbol from scratch, you click on “Symbol” from the dropdown and this pop-up will open:
Enter a name for it, and you can click on “Save and edit with Thrive Architect” to open the Thrive Architect editor and start building your symbol:
You can start by adding a “Block” element, or simply by dragging and dropping any elements inside the “Symbol” and customizing them as you wish.
Click on “Save Work” when you’re finished.
Creating a new category
Creating a new category for the Symbols of your site works just like in the case of template categories. A pop-up opens, where you have to enter the name of it and click on “Save Category”:
This is how you can use the “Symbols & Blocks” section.
Notification Toasts
The next available one is the “Notification Toasts” section, with the help of which you can very easily customize notifications and adjust how the “success” or “error” notifications are displayed.
Since this is a rather complex feature, we have created a separate article for it, that you can check out here:
Headers and Footers
Lastly in the Global Elements dashboard, you can find the “Headers” and “Footers” sections:
For the “Headers” and “Footers” feature we have dedicated a separate article, as well, and you can check it out here:
And you might find this one useful, as well:
This is how you can use the “Global Elements” section of your Thrive Dashboard.
Hopefully, this was a helpful article for you. Make sure you rate it with a smile below 😄 And don’t forget that you can find plenty of other articles and tutorials in our knowledge base.