Family law site · reusable page template
One click drops a full styled layout in. She overtypes the sample text and presses Publish. Built for a WordPress site on Oxygen, where pages hold no content and pasted HTML is stripped the moment it is saved.
The whole idea
No HTML, no classes, no wrapper divs, nothing that can be stripped on save. She changes the words between the brackets and presses Publish.
[arfl_callout type="warning" title="Deadline"] Filing closes on <strong>the 30th</strong>. [/arfl_callout]
What this is measured against
A member of my staff who is comfortable in the WordPress dashboard, and who does not write code, should be able to publish a fully styled page and a fully styled blog post using your template and your written guide, working unaided, on her first attempt.From the job posting
The technical problem
The block editor converts pasted HTML to native blocks on save. Wrapper divs, class attributes and style blocks are discarded in the process, which is exactly what the current site runs into. A shortcode is the one thing the editor stores as literal text and never rewrites. The markup is generated by PHP at render time, after the editor has finished touching the content, so there is no wrapper div left for it to throw away.
<div class="callout callout--warn"> <h4 class="callout__title">Deadline</h4> <p>Filing closes on the 30th.</p> </div> <style>.callout--warn { ... }</style> Result: two unstyled blocks. The div, the classes and the style block are gone, and the styling has to move to Additional CSS keyed to this post's ID.
[arfl_callout type="warning" title="Deadline"] Filing closes on the 30th. [/arfl_callout] Result: stored verbatim. All of it. Markup comes from the plugin on render, styling comes from one stylesheet, and nothing is keyed to a post ID ever again.
Specimen · page
Every component in one page, rendered by the plugin's own stylesheet. Nothing
below was hand-styled for this demo. The FAQ opens and closes because it is
built from <details>, so it needs no JavaScript and is
keyboard accessible as it stands.
Family Law
Divorce in South Carolina
The whole process, from the first filing to the final hearing, written for people who have never been inside a Family Court.
South Carolina recognises one no-fault ground for divorce and four fault grounds. The no-fault ground requires that the spouses have lived separate and apart, without cohabitation, for one continuous year. The fault grounds are adultery, desertion for one year, physical cruelty, and habitual drunkenness or narcotic drug use.
Most South Carolina divorces are filed on the one-year separation ground. Which ground you file on affects the timeline, what you have to prove, and in some cases whether alimony is available at all.
A Summons and Complaint is filed in the county where the action properly lies, and served on the other spouse. Service is the step that most often slows a case down, so it is planned for rather than assumed.
Usually held within a few weeks of filing. The court sets interim arrangements: who lives where, temporary custody and visitation, temporary support. Each side typically has around fifteen minutes and the evidence is by affidavit, so the affidavits do almost all of the work.
Financial declarations, document production, and where necessary depositions. In a contested case this is the longest stretch and the one where preparation on your side has the most effect on the outcome.
Family Court mediation requirements vary by circuit, and most require it before a final hearing is scheduled. A substantial share of cases resolve here, which is usually faster, cheaper and less public than trial.
If the case settles, the hearing is short and confirms the agreement. If it does not, the judge hears testimony and decides. A divorce cannot be granted earlier than three months after filing except on the grounds of adultery or one year's separation.
The temporary hearing is fifteen minutes that can set the shape of the next eighteen months. Prepare for it like it is the trial.
South Carolina is an equitable distribution state, not a community property state. Marital property is divided in the proportion the court considers fair, which is not necessarily in half. The statute sets out the factors the court weighs, including the duration of the marriage, each spouse's contribution to the marital estate, marital misconduct, and the non-marital property each spouse holds.
Property acquired before the marriage, and property received by gift or inheritance from someone other than the spouse, is generally non-marital, unless it has been commingled with marital assets. That happens more easily than most people expect.
An uncontested divorce on the one-year separation ground is often final within three to four months of filing. A contested case with custody and property in dispute commonly runs twelve to eighteen months. The honest answer at a first meeting is a range, not a date.
Not by that name. South Carolina has no legal separation status. What it has is an Order of Separate Maintenance and Support, which addresses custody, support and use of the marital home while the parties are living apart, without ending the marriage.
Yes. Unlike most states, South Carolina requires a hearing before a Family Court judge even when the divorce is entirely uncontested. It is usually brief, and one of you must still appear with a corroborating witness.
No. An attorney can represent one spouse only. A firm can prepare an agreement reached between the parties and represent one of them in presenting it, but the other spouse should have independent advice before signing.
In WordPress the FAQ component also emits FAQPage structured data, which is how
questions appear as
expandable results under a listing. It is suppressed with
schema="no" on any page where Rank Math's own FAQ block covers the
same questions, because two sets of FAQ markup on one URL is a Search Console
error rather than a bonus. The demo page omits the markup deliberately, because this
URL is not the firm's site.
Specimen · blog post
Posts skip the hero, because the post title and featured image already do that job. Otherwise the pattern is identical, which is the point: one thing to learn, not two.
Custody · 14 September 2026
How South Carolina Family Courts Decide Custody
Parents come in expecting a rule. There is no rule. There is a standard, and there is a list of things the court weighs against it.
South Carolina law directs the Family Court to decide custody according to the best interests of the child, and then sets out a list of factors the court considers in reaching that decision. The list is long and no single item on it is decisive on its own.
The court looks hard at the existing arrangement: school runs, medical appointments, homework, bedtime. A parent who can describe an ordinary Tuesday in detail is more persuasive than one who cannot.
Where the child lives, which school they attend, and how much disruption a change would cause. Continuity carries real weight.
This one surprises people. A parent who obstructs contact often damages their own position more than the conduct they were objecting to.
Almost everything the court will believe about you as a parent, it will learn from the record you created before anyone filed anything.
No. The tender years doctrine was abolished by statute. The court applies the best interests standard without a presumption in favour of either parent.
Yes, on a showing of a substantial change in circumstances affecting the child's welfare since the last order. The bar is meaningful and is not met by disliking the arrangement.
Reference
Each one is one click in the inserter, under an Ashley River Family Law category. The shortcode is what she edits; she never has to type it from memory.
| Component | Shortcode | What she controls |
|---|---|---|
| Portrait hero | [arfl_hero] |
Eyebrow, headline, intro, portrait from the media library, a list of meta items, and one button. Delete any line to drop that element. |
| Callout box | [arfl_callout] |
Title, body, and one of three styles: default, note for useful detail, warning for anything with a consequence. |
| Pull quote | [arfl_pullquote] |
The sentence, and an optional attribution. |
| Numbered process | [arfl_process] |
Steps, in any order. Numbering is CSS counters, so inserting a step in the middle renumbers the rest. She never types a number. |
| FAQ | [arfl_faq] |
Questions and answers, which one starts open, and whether structured data is emitted. |
The boundary
| Unaided, weekly | Needs a developer |
|---|---|
| Publish pages and posts with the template | Changing the template's colours, spacing or fonts |
| Add, reorder and delete any component | Adding a new kind of component |
| Menus, categories, featured images | The site header and footer |
| Restore any earlier version of a page | Anything inside Oxygen |
The dividing line is that content is hers and structure is not. Everything on the left is weekly work. Everything on the right is rare, and is what an on-call arrangement is for.
Before anyone signs anything
Each page currently stores its content inside Oxygen, in that post's
ct_builder_shortcodes meta, which is why the editor shows an empty
canvas. Getting a page onto the template means lifting its content out and
rewriting it into WordPress using the components. There is no reliable automated
conversion. Realistically 20 to 40 minutes per page, so 15 to 25 hours
across the site. The recommendation is to convert the pages the staff
actually edit and leave the rest, since the two approaches coexist without
conflict. Price it per page or as a bounded block, and name which pages are in
it.
Once this template exists, Oxygen is doing one job, drawing the shell, and it
does that competently. Moving to a block theme means rebuilding the header, footer
and every bespoke layout with rankings exposed the whole time, which is a poor
trade to make in the same window as a DNS and host migration.
Do this first and the later decision gets cheaper: content ends up
in post_content as ordinary WordPress data, which is exactly where you
want it before changing builders.
Recreating a DNS zone that carries a law firm's Google Workspace MX, SPF and verification records is. Email failing silently is worse than the site going down, and it is the one failure that can happen without anybody noticing for a day. That work belongs in its own stage, with the zone documented and diffed before the nameservers change and a hold on the old zone afterwards, not bundled into a single cutover.