Sapling Grid

Three on desktop, two on tablet and one on mobile, and you can set anything from one to four at each breakpoint. What is unusual is the spacing: it ships with a 36px row gap against a 26px column gap, deliberately more air vertically than horizontally, which is what stops an airy card design from reading as a dense table.

Content Top is the default and gives the grid its signature — every card’s picture is the last element, so the images line up in bands across the row. The catch is that a two-line title on one card and a one-line title on the next will knock those bands out of alignment. If the titles vary a lot, Content Bottom is the safer choice.

Show Text ships off on the Sapling Grid, because the layout is built around white space rather than copy. Switch it on and you get 30 words per card — twice what the Sapling Carousel allows, since a static grid row can absorb the extra height that a fixed-width slide cannot.

Limit becomes the page size. Set Limit to 9 with 40 matching posts and Show Pagination on, and you get five numbered pages of nine, with the last one short. The links hide themselves entirely when the query fits in one page, so a grid pointed at a small category never shows a stray “1”.

Yes. Put any string in the Query ID field and the widget fires a matching action while building the query, passing the WP_Query object and the widget instance, so a snippet can add a meta query, change the post status or re-sort before anything renders. It is the escape hatch for the one filter the panel does not offer.

The Limit field has no ceiling, which is exactly why it deserves care. Every post in the grid is a real query result with a featured image, so a limit of 200 on one page is a slow page — keep it near what fits on screen and turn on pagination for the rest rather than raising the number.

Yes, because the cards print their thumbnails through WordPress’s own attachment function rather than a hand-built img tag. That means core’s native lazy loading and the full srcset of registered sizes come along automatically, and your chosen Image Size — Large by default — sets the baseline rather than the only file offered.

Because the play button is driven per post. Video Source names a custom field, and only posts that actually hold a video URL in that field get an overlay play button opening a lightbox; every other card links straight through to the article. A mixed grid of written and filmed posts is therefore the expected result, not a fault.

Any theme, and no Pro. The Sapling Grid is a standard Elementor widget from the free Sky Addons for Elementor plugin, and it brings its own stylesheet for the card, so the typography and spacing you set in the panel hold whether the theme is Hello, Astra, GeneratePress or something bespoke.

Tone, and three concrete things. Sapling puts the text above the image, uses a pale rounded uppercase category chip, and defaults to generous 36px rows. The Generic Grid centres its text, pins a date chip onto the image itself, and shows only the first of a post’s categories. Both offer one to four columns and pagination.