Tag: Using Widgets

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

In this tutorial you will begin configuring various frequently-used sidebar widgets in WordPress.

Widget Configuration

By default, your site comes with a number of built-in active widgets, such as widgets for displaying external links, recent posts, text or HTML banners, add search features, etc.

(By default, your site comes with several active widgets)

How To Add Frequently-Used Widgets To Your Sidebar: Tutorial

In this tutorial, you are going to add, configure and reorder s number of WordPress widgets, including:

• Add a Contact Us graphic linking to the help page.
• Adding a Categories section.
• Add a Recent Posts section.
• Adding a list of the site’s main Pages.
• Display important Links on your sidebar.
• Add an RSS Feed section.
• Adding a list of clickable tags using a Tag Cloud.
• Add and configure an Archives section to your sidebar.

The Widgets panel is located in the WP dashboard and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …

(WordPress Widgets Menu)

This brings up the Widgets screen in your browser window …

(Widgets Screen)

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)

Text widgets let you insert just about anything you want into the sidebar navigation section or other widget sections, such as article snippets, ads, tips and more to your site … just type in text or insert HTML into the content area. You can also give the widget a title. Remember to save your settings …

(Text widgets are versatile!)

Example: Add A Contact Button To Your Sidebar Section Using A Text Widget

For this example, let’s set up a contact button on the sidebar that takes your 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 graphic image that your visitors can click on …

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

Step 1 – Upload your image.

Upload the graphic image to your server’s images folder and note the address of your server’s image location.

For example …

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

This information will be required in Step 3.

In order for someone to be taken to the contact page when the support button is clicked, you must either create a contact page, or have an existing destination page already set up (e.g. a helpdesk). We will then link your button graphic to this URL in Step 3 …

Step 2 – Create a support page.

Create a contact page and note its URL …

Step 3 – Compose your text widget code.

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 linking your graphic image to the contact page.

Your instructions can be written a simple text editor and will 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 code you will need to replace with your actual contact details …

Replace the above URLs and then copy all of the above code to your clipboard when finished.

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

• Formatting Content Using HTML Basics For New WordPress Users

Go back into your Widgets area …

(Widgets Area)

Step 4 – Add a Text widget.

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

In the Available Widgets area, select the Text widget …

(Text widget)

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

(Drag-and-drop your Text widget)

Step 5 – Configure your widget settings.

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

Add a heading to the widget if you want (e.g. “Need Help?”, “Get Help”, etc.) and paste the code with the correct destination links into the large text box, then click Save when done …

Note: Remember to check all links before pasting scripts into the Text Widget, or your button won’t work.

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

If adding text with no formatting tags like paragraph breaks, you may want to tick the Automatically add paragraphs box to wrap each block of text in paragraphs (note: not required if you’re typing in HTML content like we’re using in the example for this tutorial).

Here is some text added to a Text widget with Automatically add paragraphs box not selected …

(Automatically add paragraphs box not checked)

Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs option checked …

(Automatically add paragraphs option selected)

***

Step 6 – Refresh the browser.

After adding your text widget and code content, go to the front-end of your site and refresh the web browser. If you have entered all of the links correctly, then your support button should display at the top of the site’s sidebar menu …

(Clickable support button widget on sidebar)

The above screenshot shows the support button added to a newly-installed WordPress site.

Step 7 – Test your widget.

The last step is to make sure that your links work. Test the button to make sure that visitors will go to your help page when clicking the button. If you are taken to the contact page, then everything has been set up correctly …

(Test your text widget to make sure you’ve set up everything correctly)

Text Widgets – Useful Tips:

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

To this (i.e. insert the section containing target=”_blank” in the html code):

When choosing images to add to your sidebar area, 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 elements differently depending on their templates and layout. Some sidebars may be wider or narrower. If your theme’s sidebar is narrower than the width of the button image, then you may have to either adjust the size of your images, or the width of your sidebar column to make images display correctly on your sidebar area.

(Adjust column width or reduce image size)

Additional Tips:

• If you don’t want to center your image inside the 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 the contact button to any URL you like (e.g. to an external site, helpdesk, support forum, etc.) and change this anytime by editing the content inside the text widget.

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This is the end of part two of this series of tutorials.

To view the rest of this tutorial, click this link:

• Adding And Configuring WordPress Widgets In Your Sidebar Section – Part Three

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