3.1 – The six places

layout:
  position: left

Six values are possible:

position	Where that is	What it is good for
header	the bar at the very top, beside title and search	word mark, page name, a short badge
left	left column, under the explorer	site description, a note, navigation help
right	right column, by the table of contents	notes on the chapter, a contact box
beforeBody	between breadcrumbs and title	banners concerning the whole page: version, warning, draft status
afterBody	under the text, above the backlinks	a call to action, a read-on box, a donation notice
footer	the footer at the very bottom	colophon, imprint line, a line stating where things stand

What the place decides about the form

The same component looks right in a different way at each place. A box in the header is a word mark — short, one line, no frame. The same box after the body may have area, a bar, a heading. In the footer it is a small, centred line.

The plugin brings nothing for that: it sets layout-box as a class and whatever is in className. What a place looks like is decided by the site’s CSS — 5.2 – Styling shows it on the four boxes of this site.

beforeBody and afterBody have the full text width

The two columns are narrow; what sits there has to work in about 300 pixels. Before and after the body a box has the whole width of the text column — the right place for anything that needs lines.

Groups

Quartz can combine several components at the same place into a group, which then sits side by side instead of stacked:

layout:
  position: header
  group: brand

That is a Quartz feature, not one of the plugin’s. The word mark and the chapter name at the top of this page sit side by side that way — two boxes in one group.