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Elementor New Page Setup Checklist

Origin: Extracted from knowledge/lessons/wordpress/elementor.md during knowledge restructure (2026-05-20). The procedure body is preserved verbatim below.

New Elementor Pages Need Full Setup — Not Just Content

From legacy section: Schema Audit

Pattern: Created 4 new pages via create_page + Elementor API widgets. Pages rendered as plain unstyled HTML because they were missing: (1) _elementor_edit_mode: builder meta, (2) _elementor_page_settings: {hide_title: yes} meta, (3) theme builder template conditions in the options table, (4) widget/container styling (typography, padding, colors, button styles). Rule: When creating new Elementor pages via the API, the full checklist is: 1. wp post meta update [id] _elementor_edit_mode builder 2. wp post meta update [id] _elementor_template_type wp-page 3. wp post meta update [id] _elementor_page_settings '{"hide_title":"yes"}' --format=json 4. Add page to elementor_pro_theme_builder_conditions option (single template + footer template) 5. Apply container styling (content_width, padding, width) matching existing pages 6. Apply widget styling (heading typography, text globals, button styles) matching existing pages 7. rebuild_elementor_render on the page 8. Flush WP Rocket + object cache Missing any step = broken rendering. Do all 8 before declaring a page "deployed." Date: 2026-04-14

Additional context: Elementor Batch Save via WP-CLI

From legacy section: WP Rocket / Cache

Pattern: Created 10 pages via API. Each needed to be opened in Elementor editor and manually saved (Update button) to trigger Elementor's full save pipeline — generating rendered HTML, CSS, and registering with the theme builder. This was a manual bottleneck. Rule: Use wp eval-file build/elementor-batch-save.php to trigger $doc->save() on any number of pages at once. The script lives in build/elementor-batch-save.php. Edit the $page_ids array, SCP to server, run via WP-CLI. Suppress warnings with error_reporting(E_ERROR) — Elementor throws widgetType warnings on containers that are harmless. Add this step to the Elementor page creation checklist AFTER setting all meta and template conditions. IMPORTANT: After batch save, verify _wp_page_template is still default — Elementor's save pipeline can change it to elementor_header_footer, which bypasses the theme builder template (784) and breaks the page layout. Fix with: wp post meta update [id] _wp_page_template default. Date: 2026-04-15