Custom sections for your storefront

Every page is built from Niblr's content blocks — Hero, Product Grid, Reviews, and the rest. A custom section is for the arrangement none of those blocks quite offer: you pick a starting layout, place it on a page, and fill in your own words and pictures there. It is a new arrangement of Niblr's existing content types — text, headings, images, links, buttons — not new behaviour. Nothing about how the storefront works changes.

Custom sections are a Premium feature in two places: creating a new section, and adding a new Custom section block to a page. A downgraded store keeps every section and placement it already has — and can still edit them — but cannot create another one until it upgrades again.

What it is not

Contact forms, FAQs with expand/collapse, and anything animated stay hand-built blocks. A custom section has no logic of its own — no form submission, no accordion state, no scroll-triggered motion. If what you need behaves rather than just arranges content, it belongs in a purpose-built block, not a custom section.

The layout is reused, the content is not

A section definition is a layout, not a finished piece of content. Place the same section on two pages and each placement holds its own words and images — editing one does not touch the other. What is shared is the arrangement: how many items, what each one contains, which fields you fill in. Think of a section as a template you place repeatedly, not a snippet you write once and reuse verbatim.

Creating a section

Storefront → Sections → Create. You choose from a small set of starting layouts covering common repeated-content shapes — things like image-led card grids, a people or team grid, and cards paired with their own button or quote. Each one defines a fixed arrangement with named fields; you are not composing the arrangement yourself, just choosing which one fits. If none of them suit what you are building, a hand-built block is likely the better tool.

Each layout also fixes how many repeated items it has, and that is part of choosing the layout, not something you set separately — there is no way to add or remove items afterwards. If your list is longer or shorter than a layout's count, look for one whose count already matches, or use a hand-built block instead.

Give the section a name (this is what you will see when placing it on a page), pick the layout, and save. This creates a draft — nothing renders yet, and there is nothing to fill in here. The section definition itself only holds a name and a layout choice; the words and pictures come later, on the page.

Publish the section before you fill it in. An unpublished layout can still be picked on a page, but the content form there refuses to open until you publish it.

Placing it and filling it in

Open a page, add a Custom section block, and choose your section from the list — the picker is not filtered to published sections, so make sure the one you pick is published, or the next step will just ask you to publish it.

Right below the section picker sits a colour band field — Theme default, Default, Muted, Inverse, or Accent — for this placement only, independent of any other page carrying the same section. Leaving it on Theme default for a newly placed block does not keep tracking the section going forward: if the section is already published, saving fills the field in with that section's own band right away. If it is still a draft, nothing is filled in — the field stays on Theme default and the placement falls back to your theme's default band. Publishing the section afterwards does not go back and fill it in, so set the band yourself if you want a different one.

Below that, a content form appears, generated from your layout — one field per slot: a title, a card's image, a button's label and link, and so on. Only the slots your layout defines appear; a layout without a button simply has no button field. The form itself refuses to open until the section is published — pick one that isn't, and you see "Publish this section before filling it in" instead of any fields.

Fill in what applies, then use Save Draft to keep working without going live, or Publish changes to make the page live — the same choice as any other page edit (see Create Custom Pages).

Picking images: the image picker offers your most recently uploaded media, searchable by alt text among those — it is not a search over your whole library, and there is no upload control inside it. If the image you want is not recent enough to show up, upload it in the Media collection first, then come back and choose it.

Editing a section's layout after publishing

Editing a published section's layout creates a new draft on top of it — pages keep rendering the last published layout until you publish the edit. This means you can rework a layout without it changing on live pages mid-edit, but a save alone is not enough: publish the edit for pages to pick it up.

Switching a published section to a different starting layout can leave every page carrying it looking empty, not just different. Content is matched to the layout's fields by name, and different layouts mostly use different field names, so anything without a matching field in the new layout stops showing until you fill it in again. Nothing is deleted — switch back to the original layout and whatever you had reappears — but between switching and refilling, don't be surprised to see a placement render nothing at all.

Reverting a published section back to draft makes every page carrying it render nothing where that section would be, the same way. The block is still there, but it has nothing published to show. Publish the section again to bring it back.

Deleting a section

A section placed on any page cannot be deleted — Niblr refuses the delete and tells you how many pages still use it. Remove the block from those pages (and publish that removal) first, then delete the section.

Where do I start?

Build the rest of your page from content blocks first, so you know what a custom section would be adding rather than duplicating. Then create your first section from Storefront → Sections.

The rest of the documentation covers products, payments, domains and deployment.