Making Your WordPress Theme Widget Ready
When it comes to themes nowadays, almost all of them come widget ready yet there are still a few out there that have skipped over this functionality. If you currently have or want to use a theme that can’t support widgets, you are in luck because making a theme widget ready only takes a few lines of code and you will be good to go.
There are two sides to this problem; the first that while your theme may in fact be ready for widgets yet your sidebar doesn’t have the proper code or that you are missing the code altogether. This article will cover both aspects to ensure that your theme will be able to display widgets.
Preparing your sidebar for widgets
Most widgets find their resting place in the sidebar of a theme. Most likely the sidebar is going to have a file named…..that’s right, sidebar.php! Head on over to the WordPress Theme Editor which can be found by clicking on Editor under the Appearance tab if you are using WordPress 2.7 or above.
Once you are in the Editor, find the file named sidebar.php under the Templates section on the right hand side of the screen. To determine whether or not your sidebar is already ready to accept widgets, you need to look for a line of code that looks similar to the following
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') ||
!dynamic_sidebar() ) : endif; ?>
If you see code similar to the above then your sidebar is already configured to accept widgets and we can move on to the next part. If you find that your sidebar file doesn’t contain code similar to the above then you need to add that line.
However, make sure you know where you are placing the code. Where you place the code is where the widget(s) are going to be displayed. Once that particular piece of code is placed into your sidebar.php file it is time to move onto the next part, the functions.php file.
Also, before moving on….make sure that you click the blue Update file button in order to save your changes :)
Setting up the functions.php file
If you are still inside of the Editor, your next objective is to open up the functions.php file. Don’t be alarmed if for some reason you can’t find the file, there are some themes that do not contain the file. If you find that your theme does not have the file, you need to create one and place it inside of your theme’s directory ( wp-content/themes/themename ).
Now that that is taken care of we can continue on.
Inside of the functions.php file we are going to add 1 piece of simple short code.
<?php if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(); ?>
Simple eh? With that line of code added into the functions.php file your theme is now ready to accept widgets and display them.
Feedback!
If you read this post and understood it great! Let me know in the comments below. If you are still having issues and can't get it figured out, you are more than welcome to leave a comment or send me an email using the contact form and I'll do what I can to help!