Category: WordPress Training Manual

In Part 1 of this tutorial, we explained the basics of how to use WordPress widgets.

In this tutorial you will configure several sidebar widgets in WordPress.

How To Configure Widgets

In a default WordPress installation, your site comes with a number of built-in widgets that can be used out of the box with minimal to no configuration required, such as widgets for displaying links to your site’s pages, recent posts, RSS feed content, add search features, etc.

(In a default WordPress installation, your site comes with a number of built-in widgets)

Configuring Frequently-Used Sidebar Widgets: Step-By-Step Tutorial

In this step-by-step tutorial series, you will add, configure and reorder various widgets, including:

• Add a Help graphic button linking to the help page.
• Adding a Categories section with a drop down menu.
• Adding a Recent Posts section to display your latest posts.
• Adding a list of your site’s Pages.
• Display important Links on your sidebar navigation section.
• Adding an RSS Feed section.
• Adding a Tag Cloud.
• Add and configure an Archives section to your sidebar area.

To access the Widgets panel go to Appearance > Widgets …

(WordPress Widgets Menu)

This brings up the Widgets section in your web browser …

(Widgets Area)

Let’s begin by learning how to configure WordPress text widgets …

Add A Text Widget To The Blog Sidebar

Text widgets are quite useful …

(Text widget)

Rich Text Widget

From version 4.8 onward, WordPress has added native rich-text editing capabilities to text widgets …

(Rich Text Widget)

This lets you quickly and easily format text, create lists, add emphasis, and insert links into your sidebar text …

(Format text easily with the new text widget)

A text widget lets you insert just about anything you want into your sidebar or other widget sections, such as comments, images, news and updates and more to your site … simply by typing in text or adding HTML into the widget content area. You can also give the widget a title. Remember to save your settings …

(A text widget is extremely versatile!)

Example: Using A Text Widget To Add A Contact Button To The Sidebar Menu

For this example, we’ll set up a support button on your sidebar that takes visitors to a page on your site (or an external site, e.g. a helpdesk) where they can contact you for help and support.

First, you will need to create or source a “help button” graphic image that your visitors can click on …

We’ll set up the clickable Help button to display at the top of the sidebar navigation area like in the example shown below …

Step 1 – Upload your image.

Upload the button image to a folder on your server and write down the URL pointing to your image location.

E.g. …

http://www.yourdomain.com/images/supportbutton.jpg

You will need this information in Step 3.

For someone to go to your contact page when they click on the support button, you must either create a contact page, or have an existing destination page already set up (e.g. a helpdesk). We will link your button image to this URL in Step 3 …

Step 2 – Add your contact page.

Create a contact page and note the page URL …

Step 3 – Create your text widget code.

Don’t worry … this sounds a lot more technical than it is. In simple terms, you just need to create the instructions for your clickable image.

Your instructions can be written a simple text file and should look something like this …

• Replace “http://www.yourdomain.com/contact-us” in the code above with the URL of your contact page location.
• Replace “http://yourimagelocation.com/img/supportbutton.jpg” in the code above with the URL of your image location.

The image below shows which sections of the above sample code you will need to replace with your actual contact page and image URLs …

Replace the above URLs and then copy all of your text file content to your clipboard when finished.

If you need help understanding basic HTML code, refer to this tutorial:

• Formatting Content Using HTML Basics For Non-Technical WordPress Users

Go back into your Widgets area …

(Widgets Screen)

Step 4 – Add a Text widget.

Add a Text widget to your sidebar where you would like the support button to display.

In the Available Widgets area, find the Text widget …

(WordPress text widget)

Drag your Text widget to your Active Widgets section and release the widget at the top of the Widget Area …

(Drag and drop your WordPress text widget)

Step 5 – Configure the widget.

Click on the Text widget title bar to configure the widget options. Paste the code with the URLs to your contact page and graphic button into the text widget content area and click save …

Add a title section to the widget if you want (e.g. “Need Help?”, “Get Support”, etc.) and paste the code with the correct URLs into the Content area, then click Save when done …

Note: Make sure to test your contact page and button image URLs before pasting scripts into your Text Widget, or your clickable button will not work.

*** If using WordPress version pre-4.8 ***

If you’re adding text without formatting tags like paragraph breaks, you may want to tick the Automatically add paragraphs box to wrap each block of text in an HTML paragraph code (note: not required if you’re typing in formatted content like we’re doing in this tutorial).

Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs box not ticked …

(Automatically add paragraphs option unchecked)

Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs option ticked …

(Automatically add paragraphs option ticked)

***

Step 6 – Refresh your web browser.

After adding the widget and formatted content, visit your site and refresh the web browser. If you have entered all of the links correctly, then your clickable support button should display at the top of your sidebar menu …

(Clickable button widget on blog sidebar)

The screenshot above shows the contact button in the sidebar of a brand new WordPress site.

Step 7 – Test the button.

The last step is to ensure that the links work. Test this by clicking the help button. You should be taken to your support page …

(Test your text widget)

Tips:

If you want your contact page to open in a new browser window when visitors click on the support (so they don’t leave the page they’re in), then change the text widget code from this:

To this (i.e. include the part that says: target=”_blank” in the code):

When choosing images for your sidebar navigation area, make sure that the width of your image doesn’t exceed the width of the sidebar column, especially if you are using a non-responsive WordPress theme. As mentioned earlier, some themes may display different column widths depending on their templates and their layout. Some sidebars may be wider or narrower. If your theme’s sidebar width is narrower than the width of the button image, then you may have to either adjust the graphic size, or the column width to make images display correctly on your sidebar area.

(Adjust column width or reduce image size)

More Tips:

• If you don’t want to center your image in the sidebar, delete the <center> and </center> tags from the beginning and end of the HTML code. The image will then be aligned to its default settings (normally left-aligned).
• Link your help button to any destination you want (e.g. to an external link, contact form, FAQ page, etc.) and change this anytime by editing the code inside the text widget.

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This is the end of section two of this tutorial series.

To keep reading, click here:

• How To Add Widgets To Your WordPress Sidebar – Part Three

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