A collection is how patterns are organised, published and installed on patternbuilderwp.com. Every uploaded pattern is in exactly one. A collection belongs to one account and is private unless its publisher makes it public, and publishing is for Twenty Bellows and the partner studios it works with. People and agents install a single pattern or a whole collection through Pattern Builder on a connected site; the website shows the published collections and sends people to the plugin.
Names
A pattern on patternbuilderwp.com is named {handle}/{collection}/{pattern}, and that is the name it is installed under on every site that takes it. Your handle is chosen when you create your account, a collection’s slug when you create the collection, and a pattern’s slug is whatever it was uploaded as. None of the three can be changed afterwards, because a name that moves is a name nothing can refer to. Display names are free to change whenever you like; only the slugs are fixed.
A slug is lower-case letters, numbers and single hyphens. Collection slugs are unique to your account, so two studios can both have heroes, and pattern slugs are unique inside their collection, so two collections can each have a hero. Uploading a pattern whose slug is already used in the collection you chose is refused rather than quietly renamed — send it to another collection, or rename it on your site first. Want a different collection slug? Make a different collection.
Uploading never renames a pattern. What changes is the namespace it hangs under: a pattern that is my-theme/hero on your site becomes {handle}/{collection}/hero here, and installs under that name — which is why two accounts’ patterns of the same name can live side by side on one site, in patterns/{handle}/{collection}/.
Personal
Every account has Personal from the moment it is created. It is always private, and it cannot be renamed, deleted or made public. It is where a pattern lands when nothing else is chosen, and where patterns go when their collection is deleted and you choose to keep them. On a free account Personal holds up to 25 patterns; Pro removes the cap.
Public, private and premium
A collection is private (only you), public (listed in the directory and on this website, installable by any connected account), or premium (a public collection that only Pro accounts may install from; only Twenty Bellows staff can mark one premium). Only an account with publishing rights — Twenty Bellows, and the partner studios and theme authors it invites — can make a collection public; every other account’s collections are private, always. A pattern is public exactly when its collection is public or premium.
Making a collection public re-runs the content checks on every pattern in it; a pattern that fails stays unlisted until it is updated and passes. Making it private again withdraws its patterns. Every public pattern can be reported to staff.
Free and Pro
| Free | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Personal (private) | up to 25 patterns | no cap |
| Collections of your own | — | as many as you like, private |
| Free collections | browse and install | browse and install |
| Premium collections | browse | browse and install |
| Publishing | by invitation | by invitation |
Collections of your own are what Pro adds: private, as many as you like, to organise work by client, by project or by kind. Nothing on a free account is public, and nothing on a Pro account is either, unless Twenty Bellows has given the account publishing rights. When Pro lapses nothing is held hostage: your collections and a Personal over the cap stay readable and installable, nothing more can be added to them, and you can delete or subscribe again.
Managing collections
Collections are managed in Pattern Builder, on the Uploaded tab; the website’s account page only lists them. Down the left are your collections, Personal first with its meter. New collection, on Pro, asks a name, a slug — permanent, and part of the name of every pattern in it — and a description; a publisher also chooses the visibility. The selected collection’s header offers Rename or describe, its Visibility where the account may publish, and Delete, which deletes the collection and every pattern in it and says so first. Download anything worth keeping before you do; it can be uploaded into another collection afterwards.
Installing
Nothing downloads from this website: no zip, no file, no link. Open Appearance → Pattern Builder on your site, sign in on the Directory tab, and save a pattern or a whole collection as theme patterns or user patterns, images included. A pattern installed from a collection lands under a local pattern category named for it, so the inserter shows where it came from. The cloud library walks through it.
Agents
An agent reaches the cloud through a connected site and nothing else. It authenticates to your WordPress site with an application password, which makes it that WordPress user, and Pattern Builder’s abilities run as that user with the connection that user made — the site admin issued the password, the account holder connected, and the agent never holds a cloud credential. It may list and search collections and patterns, install a pattern or a whole collection, upload a pattern into a collection, and create a collection — private, as every collection is unless a publisher makes it public; on a free account this is refused with the upgrade message, since collections of your own are a Pro feature. It may not make a collection public, change a visibility, or delete a collection. Abilities and agents lists the calls.