CSS Grid with an additional wrapper in the middle

Question

I want to use CSS Grid's grid-template-areas.

But the problem is that the CMS I'm using is adding lots of additional wrappers. Is there a way to ignore extra wrappers? since it is messing up the nice grid areas...

I'm trying to override css grid's auto-placement mechanism. So any div that is in the middle, and wasn't assigned a specific grid-area, will appear at the end of the grid, and wouldn't mess with the grid itself.

I created an example of the problem here - https://codepen.io/shaal/pen/qPvQWW

You can see that because of the extra wrapper, the 'sidebar' element is not assigned to the areas I wanted it to be.

HTML

.container {
  display: grid;
  grid-gap: 5px;
  grid-template-areas: "header header header" "sidebar content content" "sidebar content content" "footer footer footer";
}

.header {
  grid-area: header;
}

.sidebar {
  grid-area: sidebar;
}

.content {
  grid-area: content;
  height: 180px;
}

.footer {
  grid-area: footer;
}

<h1>CSS GRID</h1>
<div class="container">
  <div class="item header">Header</div>
  <div class="cms-annoying-wrapper">
    <div class="item sidebar">Sidebar</div>
    <div class="item content">Content</div>
  </div>
  <div class="item footer">Footer</div>
</div>

Answer 1

Grid Layout Module Level 2 - Subgrids are supposed to solve this problem.

---

In the meantime, there is a workaround:

display: contents (caniuse)

From Caniuse:

display: contents causes an element's children to appear as if they were direct children of the element's parent, ignoring the element itself. This can be useful when a wrapper element should be ignored when using CSS grid or similar layout techniques.

So in your scenario you could simply add the rule:

.cms-annoying-wrapper {
  display: contents;
}

body {
  margin: 10px;
  text-align: center;
  width: 580px;
}
.cms-annoying-wrapper {
  display: contents;
}


.container {
  display: grid;
  grid-gap: 5px;
  grid-template-areas: 
    "header header header"
    "sidebar content content"
    "sidebar content content"
    "footer footer footer";
}

.item {
  color: white;
  padding: 1.5em 0;
  font-size: 2em;
}

.header {
  background: #0d6;
}

.sidebar {
  background: #f00;
}

.content {
  background: #d60;
}

.footer {
  background: #60d;
}

.header {
  grid-area: header;
}

.sidebar {
  grid-area: sidebar;
}

.content {
  grid-area: content;
  height: 180px;
}

.footer {
  grid-area: footer;
}

<h1>CSS GRID</h1>
<div class="container">
  <div class="item header">Header</div>
  <div class="cms-annoying-wrapper">
    <div class="item sidebar">Sidebar</div>
    <div class="item content">Content</div>
  </div>
  <div class="item footer">Footer</div>
</div>

Codepen Demo (firefox)

Answer 2

If using the unwrap jQuery function to remove this div is not a problem for you I would use it.

$(".sidebar").unwrap(".cms-annoying-wrapper");

Otherwise in plain JS : https://plainjs.com/javascript/manipulation/unwrap-a-dom-element-35/