Assignment Rules
A template does nothing until it's assigned to something. This is where you tell it what to apply to.
Choosing Which Posts Get Which Template
Once a template is built, it never applies anywhere on its own. This screen decides exactly which posts get it automatically, whenever a featured image is generated — on publish, on demand, or in bulk.
🟦 How rules work
A template’s Assignment rules are a flat list — any one rule matching is enough to apply that template. There’s no combining conditions with AND, no rule groups, and no live estimate of how many posts match — a deliberately simple model, since most templates only ever need one or two conditions.
Templates are checked in the order they’re listed, and the first one whose rules match wins. A template marked as the fallback is never checked against its own rules — it’s only used once every other template has been tried and none matched.
🟩 Every rule row
Each rule has up to three parts: a Condition (Category, Tag, Meta Box field, or ACF field), a Field name (only used by the two field-based conditions — ignored for Category/Tag), and a Value.
🟧 Condition types available
| Condition type | What it checks | Expected value |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Post has this exact category | the category slug |
| Tag | Post has this exact tag | the tag slug |
| Meta Box field | A specific Meta Box field’s value | field key, plus a value (leave blank to just check the field isn’t empty) |
| ACF field | A specific ACF field’s value | field name, plus a value (leave blank to just check the field isn’t empty) |
🟥 A blank Value doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere
For Category and Tag, an empty Value never matches anything — you must always pick an exact slug. For Meta Box and ACF fields, an empty Value means something different and useful: the rule matches as soon as that field has any value at all, whatever it is. Don’t leave a Category/Tag rule’s value blank expecting “any category” — it simply won’t fire.
🟫 The fallback template
Check “Use this template when no rule below (or on any other template) matches a post” on exactly one template — that’s the one applied when nothing else’s rules match. It’s a setting shared across all your templates, not tied to one template’s own rules, so only one template should carry it. If more than one does, the first one found wins silently.