Global sections

A global section is a piece of page you build once and place on many pages. Edit it in one place and every page using it changes. Headers and footers are the obvious case, but any section works: a promo strip, a "contact us" block, a band of reviews.

Making one

Select a Section on the page, open its menu, choose Set as Global.

The dialog asks for two things:

Name — "Site header", say. You will see this in the global sections panel and in the warning shown while you are editing it.

Type — Header, Footer, or Custom.

Type is chosen once and cannot be changed. The dialog says exactly that. If you pick wrong, the only way out is to create another section — so choose carefully.

Why type matters: the band rule

This is the one rule about global sections you can break, and the page will refuse to save if you do:

• A Header has to sit at the very top of the page.
• A Footer has to sit at the very bottom.
• A global section may only sit at the top level — never nested inside another section.
• A page may not carry the same global section twice.

Break any of them and saving gives you "This page can't be saved as it is" with the reason and the fix. It is a fixable refusal: your work is not lost, the page simply will not save until things are back in place.

The reason for the rule: a header that has drifted into the middle of a page is no longer a header, and everything that reads page structure — the renderer, the layer tree, drag and drop — depends on those two bands being where they say they are.

Putting it on other pages

Open the Global section panel, find its card, and drag it onto the page. The card says "Drag to add this global section". If the current page already has it, the card reads Already on this page and will not drag — the no-duplicates rule above.

Each card also tells you Used on {n} pages, so you always know how much you are about to affect.

The card's menu holds: Select pages (add it to several at once), Rename, Remove from this page, and Delete forever.

Editing it

Click the global section on any page and edit it normally. While you do, the editor shows a warning in the top bar:

"You're editing “{name}”, used on {n} page(s) — changes apply everywhere it's used."

It stays there the whole time you are editing, because this is the easiest thing to forget about the feature.

When somebody else is editing too

If someone has just changed this global section elsewhere, you get:

"{name} has a newer version — You have unsaved changes in this section. Applying the newer version replaces them."

You decide: keep yours, or take theirs. Nothing chooses for you, because either choice throws away somebody's work.

If you save a page whose global section has fallen behind the newest version, the page saves but the global section does not — and you are told: "“{name}” was edited elsewhere — your changes to it were not saved."

Deleting it

Delete forever removes it from every page using it, and cannot be undone. The dialog lists those pages by name before you confirm.

One thing that is easy to miss, and the dialog says it:

"Pages that are already published keep showing it until you publish them again."

Deleting affects the draft. The live pages out there still carry it until the next publish.

If you only want it off one page, use Remove from this page — the global section itself survives and other pages are untouched.

Global styles are a different thing

In the same area you will find Global styles: colours, type and presets shared by the whole site. "Edit once, applies everywhere."

The difference: a global section is content (an actual piece of page), and global styles are presentation (applied to everything). You generally want both.