In Part One of this step-by-step tutorial series, we explained the basics of how to use WordPress widgets.
In this section you are going to begin configuring various sidebar widgets in WordPress.
Configuring Sidebar Widgets
In a default WordPress installation, your site comes with several preinstalled widgets that can be used out of the box with little to no configuration required, such as widgets for displaying external links, recent posts, RSS feed content, filter content by tags, etc.
(In a default WordPress installation, your site comes with a number of preinstalled widgets)
Configuring Widgets On The Blog Sidebar Navigation Area: Tutorial
In this tutorial, we will add, configure and reorder various WordPress widgets, including:
- Add a clickable Support graphic linking visitors to your contact details page.
- Adding a Categories section.
- Add a Recent Posts section to display your latest posts.
- Add a list of Pages.
- Display useful Links on the sidebar menu.
- Display news items using an RSS Feed section.
- Adding a list of clickable tags through a Tag Cloud.
- Adding and configuring an Archives section to the sidebar menu.
To access the Widgets panel log into the WordPress administration and go to Appearance > Widgets …
(Widgets Menu)
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
Let’s begin to configure your widgets …
Text Widgets
Text widgets are incredibly useful …
(WordPress 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 the sidebar or other widget sections, such as article snippets, ads, news and updates and more to your site … simply by typing in text or inserting HTML into the content area. You can also add an optional title in the Title field. Remember to save your settings when done …
(A text widget is very useful!)
Example: Use A Text Widget To Add A Clickable Contact Button To The Sidebar Section
For this example, let’s set up a contact button on the sidebar navigation section 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 visitors can click on …
We’ll set up a clickable button to display at the top of the sidebar section like in the example shown below …
Step 1 – Upload your image.
To display the clickable button image on your site, you must first upload the image to your server’s images folder and write down the address of your server’s image location.
For example …
http://www.yourdomain.com/images/supportbutton.jpg
This information will be used in Step 3.
For visitors to go to the contact page when they click on the graphic button, you will need to either create a contact page, or have an existing destination page already set up (e.g. a helpdesk). We will link your button graphic to this URL in Step 3 …
Step 2 – Create a contact page.
Create a contact page and note its URL …
Step 3 – Create the code for your text widget.
If you’re not a technical-minded person, don’t worry … this sounds a lot more technical than it is. Basically, we just need to create the instructions for your clickable image.
Your code can be composed in a simple text editor and should look something like this …
- Replace “http://www.yourdomain.com/contact-us” in the code 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 code you need to replace with the actual web addresses …
Replace the above URLs and then copy the above code to your clipboard when finished.
If you need help understanding basic HTML code, refer to this tutorial:
Go back to your Widgets panel …
(Widgets Panel)
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, select a Text widget …
(WordPress text widget)
Drag the Text widget to the Active Widgets section and release it at the very top of the Widget Area …
(Drag-and-drop your Text widget)
Step 5 – Configure the text widget settings.
Click on the widget title bar to configure the widget settings. 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 to your widget if you want (e.g. “Need Help?”, “Get Support”, etc.) and paste the code with the correct destination URLs into the text area, then click Save when done …
Note: Remember to test all links before pasting scripts into your Text Widget, or your button will not work.
*** If using WordPress version pre-4.8 ***
If 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 pasting in formatted HTML content like we’re using in the example for this tutorial).
Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs box not checked …
(Automatically add paragraphs option not checked)
Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs box checked …
(Automatically add paragraphs option checked)
***
Step 6 – Refresh your web browser.
Once you have added the widget and code, visit the front end of your site and refresh the web browser. If all links have been entered correctly, then the support button should display at the top of your site’s sidebar menu …
(Clickable button widget on sidebar)
The above screenshot shows the contact button in the sidebar of a newly-installed WordPress site.
Step 7 – Test the button.
The last step is to ensure that your destination link works. Test this by clicking on the button. If you are taken directly to the contact page, then the text widget has been set up correctly …
(Test the text widget)
Tips:
If you would like the support page to open inside a new window when visitors click on the help (so they don’t leave the page they’re on), then change the text widget code from this:
To this (i.e. add the section containing target=”_blank” in your html code):
When inserting images into your sidebar navigation menu, make sure that the width of the image does not exceed the width of the sidebar column, especially if you are using a non-responsive WordPress theme. Note that some themes may display different column widths depending on their templates and their layout. Some sidebars are wide and some are narrow. If the sidebar of your theme is narrower than the width of your button image, then you may need to either adjust the graphic size, or the column width to make elements display correctly on your sidebar area.
(Make sure that the image width does not exceed the sidebar column width)
Additional Tips:
- If you don’t want to center your button inside your sidebar, delete the <center> and </center> tags from the beginning and end of the code. The image will then be aligned to its default settings (normally left-aligned).
- Link your contact button to any URL you like (e.g. to an external link, contact form, forum, etc.) and change this anytime by replacing the code in the widget.
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This is the end of part two of this tutorial on using Widgets.
Click on this link to continue:
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