Sunday, February 28, 2010

How to add sidebar (widget) placeholder in Wordpress

I didn't find too many posts on Google about this, so I thought I'm going to help you guys to add sidebar (widget) placeholder in Wordpress; it's really so simple:

1 Register your sidebar


Simply open your template's functions.php (by default it's wp-content/themes/[yourtheme] - where [yourtheme] is the folder name of your theme):

Mine looked like this:
(click in the box to highlight the code for copy)

So I just added before the ?> closing tag the following code:
(click in the box to highlight the code for copy)

As you can see, the only thing I did was to copy one set of codes of the sidebars above and pasted it changing the name from 2 to 3. You can change the before_widget, before_widget, before_title and after_title values to whatever you want; you'll be able to use these values later on when styling your widget.

2 Insert the placeholder into your page


Insert this code into the page you want to see the sidebar on:
(click in the box to highlight the code for copy)

3 Add Widgets to the sidebar


Go to Widgets in your Wordpress admin page and add a widget to your newly created sidebar (in my case it is called 'Sidebar3')

4 Style it!


Just add some id's and classes into your page before the sidebar placeholder and style them in your theme's .css.

And we're done! ;)

Later on I found the post How to Add Widgets to WordPress Theme’s Footer - you may find some important additional information in there.

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