Add Column to Section is a WordPress ability from Ultimate Addons for Elementor — usable via Easy MCP AI, which connects Claude, ChatGPT, and any AI assistant to your site.

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Add Column to Section

Write

Adds a new column to an existing section or container in an Elementor post, redistributing column widths automatically.

Requires the Ultimate Addons for Elementor (Header Footer & Elementor) plugin on WordPress 6.9+ (the WP Abilities API). No ability registers unless the plugin's 'Enable AI Tools' master switch (uae_mcp_settings.enable_abilities) is turned on in settings. Most abilities require the 'manage_options' capability; a smaller set of read/discovery abilities (template and page listing, the Elementor builder read/list/schema abilities, active-template lookup, display-rule locations, and design tokens) instead require only 'edit_posts' or 'read'. Abilities that act on a specific page, post, or template additionally check the current user's per-object 'edit_post' (or 'delete_post') capability on that item. Separately, every non-readonly (Write or Destructive) ability is gated behind a site-wide 'Allow Modifications' setting at registration time: if it is off, none of those abilities are even registered with the WP Abilities API, regardless of capability checks — this covers all template/page CRUD, widget/extension toggles, display-rule updates, theme/settings changes, and the Elementor builder writes alike, not just the builder ones. Eight of those abilities (the seven Elementor page-builder writes — build, insert-widget, update-widget, remove-element, move-element, add-section, add-column — plus pages-create) additionally re-check this same setting explicitly inside execute() as a redundant safeguard.

What it does

Given post_id and section_id (the target section/container element ID) and an optional auto_resize flag (default true, which evenly redistributes all column widths after the new column is added), the handler adds a column to the post's element tree, then saves the result. Its instructions describe this as an incremental change for an existing section, recommending builder-build instead when constructing multi-column layouts from scratch.

See it in action

You ask your AI assistant

"Add another column to section sec_10 in post 42 and auto-resize the existing columns to fit."

Inputs

Name Type Required Description
post_id integer Yes Any Elementor-enabled post ID (page, post, or HFE template).
section_id string Yes Section or container element ID to add a column to.
auto_resize boolean No If true (default), automatically redistributes all column sizes evenly.

Returns

Returns success, the new column_id, and a message suggesting the column_id for follow-up widget insertion via builder-insert-widget.

Permission

permission_callback requires current_user_can('edit_posts'); execute() also calls check_modifications_allowed() (403 unless 'Allow Modifications' is enabled) and validate_elementor_post() (Elementor-post validation plus current_user_can('edit_post', ID)).

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