Creating Your First Template
A template is a canvas, a background, and a few layers — built visually, with a live preview the whole way through.
Building Your First Template, Step by Step
A template is nothing more than a canvas size, a background, and a stack of layers — text, image, or rectangle — positioned directly on a live preview. Nothing here requires a design tool; everything is built inside the WordPress admin.
🟦Start a new template
Go to ThumbnailWP → Templates and click New template. Give it a name, pick an aspect ratio family — Landscape 1.91:1 or Square 1:1 — and set the canvas size in pixels (1200×630 and 1080×1080 are the common defaults for each family).
🟩 Set the background
Choose Color for a flat background, or Image (cover-fit) to use a dynamic source like the post’s featured image. A fallback color is always used underneath — it shows through if the dynamic image can’t be resolved for a given post.
🟧 Add and position your first layer
Click + Add layer and choose its type: Text, Image, or Rectangle. Drag it directly on the live preview to move or resize it, or type exact X / Y / Width / Height percentages in the panel on the right — positions are always relative to the canvas, so a template scales cleanly to any resolution within the same aspect ratio family.
🟥 Pull in real content
On a Text or Image layer, set Content / source to a dynamic tag — the post title, the featured image, a category, or any Meta Box/ACF field — instead of static text. The layer then shows different, real content for every post the template applies to.
🟫 Preview the real output
The live preview is a close CSS approximation, useful while dragging things around — but click Check the real output at any time to see the exact image the server will actually generate, pixel for pixel.
🟪 Save it
Click Save template once it looks right. From here, connect it to real content with Assignment rules so it knows which posts to apply to.