Wordpress Tutorial: Creating A Sidebar Part Four - Widgitize Your Theme ∫ The Webmaster's Edge

Jul 10th

2008

Wordpress Tutorial: Creating A Sidebar Part Four - Widgitize Your Theme

Written by User Image

Bradford (Who am I?)

Posted @ 2:37 pm

As you may know, I am helping to administer The Woolly Mom. However, the theme we are using doesn’t have a dynamic sidebar. I must correct this! The steps: Decide the layout, Write the CSS, Make it dynamic, Add the Widgets.

Today’s Topic: Widgitize The Sidebar

In order to ad widgets to a sidebar, we must undergo a few simple steps in order to widgetize the theme, assuming the theme isn’t already widget-ready. The first step is to take a look at your sidebar setup. Ours is:

<li><div class="sbartitle">THE TITLE</div>

THE WIDGET

</li>

So to facilitate this, we create a functions.php template file and include the following in it:

<?php

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )

    register_sidebar(array(

        'before_widget' => '<li>',

        'after_widget' => '</div></li>',

        'before_title' => '<div class="sbartitle">',

        'after_title' => '</div><div style="margin-right:10px">',

    ));

?>

Once this is setup, I placed the following code where her sidebar should be (after the <ul> tag):

<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')

        || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>

Then right before the </ul> tag:

<?php endif; ?>

And viola! Add the widgets and that’s that! If you want some items to appear in the sidebar before the widgets (without using the text widget), just add those items before the above code right after the <ul> tag.

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