WordPress Widget Tutorial
WordPress widgets make it easy to customise the content on the sidebar of your website. Learn how WordPress widgets work, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users, and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your web site.
There are loads of great things about using the WordPress web publishing tool to build and manage your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout with no coding skills and knowledge required.
WordPress also lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using a unique feature called a Widget.
In this WordPress Widget Tutorial you will learn what widgets are, what makes widgets so useful, and how widgets can help you to expand the functionality of your web site.
Widgets – What Are They? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Newbies
A WP widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or list item to your site.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to program PHP code.
Now don’t worry if the above sounds too “geeky” to you. As you are about to discover, widgets are perfect for “non-techies”.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of your site.
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove sections of code in parts of your site without touching any code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your theme on widget-enabled areas of your site (e.g. the sidebar, header, footer and other areas) using drag-and-drop technology.
Here are just some of the great functions you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- list of pages
- site categories
- blog post archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- clickable text ads
- quotations
- polls
- content from RSS feeds
- newsletter subscription form
- video
- social media buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we have explained plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and even alter the design of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, WP themes can affect how widgets display on your website and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that can extend your site’s performance.
Widget Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide what is called “widget” areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Normally, this is going to be in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the site’s header, in the footer, sometimes even below or above your content.
It all depends on the kind of theme you have installed on your site or blog.
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below includes a number of different widgetized areas …
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WP theme …
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found within your WP admin area and can be accessed from the dashboard menu by going to Appearance > Widgets ….
This brings up your Widgets area in your browser window …
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets you have available.
On the right hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
Widgets dragged from the “Available Widgets” section to “Widget Areas” like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately and available to visitors on your site.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an “Inactive Widgets” section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site without losing their settings.
By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets (e.g. widget for displaying your pages, links, posts, post categories, adding text, adding RSS feeds, adding tags, adding a search box, etc) and active widgets.
These widgets are available in the default WordPress theme “right out of the box” and display items like “Search”, “Archives”, “Meta”, etc immediately to your site visitors …
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
Widgets Features: “Drag And Drop”
Widgets are great, because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them within your Widgets area just by using “drag and drop” …
Using “drag and drop” technology also lets you easily reorder the layout of your website’s “widget” sections.
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A “contact support” button, and
- A couple of “click to phone” sales buttons from a widget WordPress plugin …
If you took a look inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget area …
If we change the order these widgets in the Widget Area using the drag and drop method …
The widget features have now been reorganised in the sidebar …
As you can see this instantly changes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the “click to call” function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the “contact us” banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Let me just show you some more things worth knowing about widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do a bunch of edits to widgets in “preview” mode, like adding, removing and reorganising the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done in real time. If you like what you’ve done and click the “Save and Publish” button, your changes will then be instantly updated and reflected to your site visitors.
Widget management is a great feature of WordPress. You can work in “preview” mode inside the WordPress Theme Customise screen (Appearance > Customise) and see how your widget content will appear prior to publishing any changes (and avoid making errors), or change widgets “on the fly” using the Widget editor area as shown previously.
WordPress Widget Tutorial – Configuration
As I have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorder how information is displayed in “widget areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using using “drag-and-drop” …
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the layout in the sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions within the sidebar widget area.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customised instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customise features on page elements like a member login section, or just add features like a page index, or a drop down menu of your content categories, a post archives section, custom menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, quotations or polls, RSS content, product catalogue images, social media share buttons, and more..
Most widgets offer additional options that allow you to further configure them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors, but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your “Active” widget area.
There are some tips and tricks for using widgets, however, and we will soon be adding more detailed step-by-step tutorials to this site showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many cool tips for getting the most benefit out of WordPress using widgets, so stay tuned and come back soon!
Related Posts
If you are a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WP web site publishing software please see our related posts section.
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