Creating a FAQs page - Meta Box + Breakdance

Having a FAQs page on your site will help the visitors to find the information they want quickly. There’re many ways to create a page for FAQs and in this practice, we’ll share with you one of the most helpful ways by using Meta Box and then use Breakdance to build it.

This is an example of a FAQs page that I created.

Video version

Preparation

The FAQs page includes several couples of question and answer that are saved in custom fields.

Here are some tools we need for this practice:

• Meta Box core plugin: to have a framework for creating a custom post type and custom fields;
• Meta Box Group: to organize custom fields into pairs for questions and answers;
• Meta Box Builder: to have a UI on the backend to easily create custom fields;
• Breakdance to build the page. Make sure you activate and update to the latest version to have full integration with Meta Box.

1. Creating a new page

Go to Pages > Add New to create a new blank page.

It will be our FAQ page.

2. Creating custom fields

Go to Meta Box > Custom Fields > Add New. This is the structure of the fields I created:

Name	Field Type	Settings
FAQs Group	Group	Cloneable Collapsible
Questions	Text	-
Answer	Textarea	-

Each question will go along with an answer. So, we add a group to set them in a pair.

Since we may have more than one pair of questions and answers, I set this group cloneable.

Then we’ll have an Add more button like this.

Each pair of question and answer may have long content, or there may be too many pairs, so you should set this group collapsible.

Then they will display in a more succinct way.

And you can add titles for the group as follows. The {#} variable is for numbering the pair and the {question} variable is the ID of the question field to show the question on the title.

After creating all the fields and having reasonable settings, move to the Settings tab, choose Location as Post type, and select Page. To apply the fields to the page you want, go to the Advanced location rules section below and choose your page. In this case, I chose FAQ.

After publishing, you will see all of the custom fields in the page editor. Just enter some questions and answers. Click Add more to add other pairs.

3. Creating a global block

We’ll have more than one pair of questions and answers. So let’s create a global block to display the information and set the layout and style for a pair.

Go to Breakdance > Global Blocks to create a new one.

Add a Div element to cover the block.

For the content of the question, add a Text element.

Because the question is saved in the custom field created by Meta Box, we should insert dynamic data from the field to this element through this icon button.

Look for the Meta Box section, then select the name of the field that we use to save the question.

Next, add another Text element for the answer.

Also insert dynamic data from the Answer field.

Now, you can see a couple of questions and answers displayed.

You can style this block by changing the settings in the Style tab of each element. And this is the new look of the global block.

4. Displaying Q&As on the page

Go back to edit the page in Breakdance. It’s still blank now. We’ll display the questions and answers here.

They are in a cloneable group, so add a Repeater Field element.

In the Global Block section of its settings, choose the name of the global block that we’ve just created.

Next, go to the Field section. Choose the name of the group field that contains the Question and Answer field.

Now, all the questions and answers are displayed with the style we set in the global block.

You can change the settings of the Repeater Field element to have a better layout. Let’s see the page on frontend. All the questions and answers display adequately.