What’s a Widget? March 19, 2010 at 4:27 pm
I am about to take you widget hunting! Always wondered what a widget is? I know I did. What exactly is a widget and why should we worry about them? I know when I first saw the word appearing on websites I was wondering is this a new Virus or a new Trojan or what exactly is it. It had me mystified for a while. Sometimes I can’t be the brightest beacon on the horizon! In due course I did explore to find out exactly what it was and why it was useful.
The penny dropped. A widget is a little tool that I as the viewer of the website can use on that website to do something. It’s that little thing I click on to see the weather for my city.
Let’s find out more about widgets. (What exactly is a widget-ready WordPress theme?)
In actual fact let’s look at Word press widgets and why they are included in themes. This means in essence that the theme is set up to include an area that will allow you to use this area to do the drag and drop method to put in certain types of information. Most of these areas are in the sidebar of the theme. Widgets made their debut in WordPress 2.2 and are now considered to be part and parcel of most themes.
Do you really want widgets? (Why would you want to use widgets?)
Well you might want them if you want easier connection to alter items in your sidebar. Having one enables you to move things around far more easily. But your theme really needs to be widget ready for you to do so. So let’s get started and check.
Let’s learn how to use widgets.
Step 1: Make sure the theme is widget ready.
You need to make the theme widget-ready. So, move on over to your Presentation menu and find the widgets section in the admin panel. If you find that there is no sidebar, sorry, you are unlucky.
Step 2: See what is available
We are presuming there are widgets available and we are going to use these.
Drag and drop some of the widgets that are available into the sidebar.
If the wording can be changed it will indicate this will a little icon. You can change the wording on them to suit you.
Step 3: Additional Widgets
Scrolling on down the page you can see more widgets that are available.
Some should be text widgets where you can put in any text and show them in the sidebar. Grab the ones you want and save them.
We are going to use two widgets that have text.
Drop your text in and put them where you want them in the sidebar. Save the section.
I am sure you found that easy and its does add great fun to your WordPress Theme. If you want more widgets WordPress has a special section where you can find approved 3rd party widgets. Let’s go widget hunting. Wonder if that’s like snipe. It’s something to think about.
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