Every country website in SIA Publishing and Play is built from the same underlying template. That template is called Stencil — a WordPress site that sits alongside all the country sites but is never published publicly. Stencil holds the master version of every page, and country sites are built by copying from it.
Stencil defines the complete structure of a country website: which pages exist, what order they appear in the navigation, and what components each page is made of. This structure is called the sitemap, and it applies to every site of the same type — all Candidate sites share one sitemap, all Host sites share another, and so on.
Each entry in the sitemap corresponds to a layout — a named page template that specifies which content blocks appear on that page and in what arrangement. The layout for “About Us” on a Candidate site, for instance, always contains the same structural components: a page header, a text section, and so on.
Within the structure defined by Stencil, editors fill in content. Each block on a page has fields — a heading, a body text area, an image — and these are entirely the editor’s to manage. The structure of the page is fixed; the content within it is not.
Some pages are conditionally shown or hidden depending on where a country is in the programme cycle. These visibility rules are set centrally, not by editors on individual sites.
When a new country site is created, its pages are generated automatically by applying layouts from Stencil. Each page gets its title, URL slug, and block structure copied from the corresponding Stencil page. From that point on, editors on that site fill in the content.
If Stencil’s version of a layout is updated — for example, a new component is added to a page template — the updated layout can be pushed to existing country sites. Editors’ content is not affected; only the structural scaffolding changes.
Changes to the site structure — adding a new page to the sitemap, changing the components that make up a layout, adjusting which pages are visible at which programme stages — all happen in code, not in the WordPress admin. These changes need to be made in the layout configuration and deployed.
If a page appears to be missing, duplicated, or has the wrong structure, the right path is to check the sitemap and layout configuration rather than to manually create or move pages in WordPress.
The complete page hierarchy for all site types is shown in the interactive Sitemap Overview in the design system documentation. Each page card in the overview can be clicked to show its details.
Title The name of the page, as it appears in the navigation and the browser tab.
Excerpt A short description of the page’s purpose.
Audience Who the page is primarily intended for, such as alumni or partners. Not all pages have an audience set.
Page usage The functional role of the page, such as informational. Not all pages have a page usage set.
Navigation Whether the page appears in the site menu, and if so at which tier of the hierarchy.
Layout The internal identifier for the page template used by this page.
Placement The site type this page belongs to — Candidate, Host, International, Retreat, or Summit.
Version The current structural version of the page template. This increments when the layout is updated.
The block editor is intentionally constrained on layout-managed pages. Editors cannot add arbitrary blocks to a page because the page structure is defined by its layout — only the content fields within each block are editable. A small number of layouts, such as the Impact Blueprint, are configured to allow free editing as an exception.