Tag: Using Widgets

In Part One of this tutorial series, we cover the basics of using widgets in WordPress.

In this tutorial you are going to configure a number of commonly-used sidebar widgets in WordPress.

Widget Configuration

By default, your site comes with several preinstalled active widgets, such as widgets for displaying external links, recent posts, text or HTML banners, adding a search box, etc.

(In a default WordPress installation, your site comes with several pre-installed widgets)

Configuring Widgets On The Sidebar: Tutorial

In this tutorial series, you will learn how to add, configure and reorder various widgets, including:

• Add a clickable Support button linking to your support page.
• Add a Categories section.
• Add a Recent Posts section to display your latest posts.
• Add a list of Pages.
• Display Links on the sidebar navigation area.
• Add an RSS Feed section.
• Adding clickable tags through a Tag Cloud.
• Add and configure an Archives section to the sidebar.

To access the Widgets panel go to Appearance > Widgets …

(WordPress Widgets Menu)

This brings up the Widgets panel in your browser …

(Widgets Section)

Let’s get started …

Add A Text Widget To Your Sidebar

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 navigation menu or other widget sections, such as policies, videos, messages and more to your site … simply type in text or paste HTML into the widget 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: Add A Clickable Help Button To The Sidebar Area Using A Text Widget

For this example, we’ll set up a contact button on your sidebar navigation area 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, create or source a graphic image that your visitors can click on …

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

Step 1 – Upload your image.

To display the clickable button image on your site, first you must upload the button image to a folder on your server and note the URL pointing to your image location.

For example …

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

You will use this information in Step 3.

For visitors to go to the 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 then link your button graphic to this URL in Step 3 …

Step 2 – Add the contact page.

Create a contact page on your site and note down its URL …

Step 3 – Create the code for your text widget.

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 button.

Your code can be typed into a simple text editor and will 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 with the URL of your image location.

The image below shows the sections of the above sample code that you 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 understanding basic HTML code, refer to this tutorial:

• A Practical Guide To HTML Tags

Go back into your Widgets screen …

(Widgets Panel)

Step 4 – Add a Text widget.

Add a Text widget to your sidebar in the location where your button should display.

In the Available Widgets area, select the Text widget …

(Text widget)

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

(Dragging and dropping your Text widget)

Step 5 – Configure the text widget settings.

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

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

Note: Make sure to test all links before pasting scripts into your Text Widget, or your clickable button will not 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 an HTML paragraph code (note: this is not necessary if you type 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 option unchecked …

(Automatically add paragraphs box not ticked)

Here is some text added to a Text widget with Automatically add paragraphs box selected …

(Automatically add paragraphs option checked)

***

Step 6 – Refresh your web browser.

After adding your text widget and formatted content, visit the front-end of your site and refresh the browser. If you have entered all of the links correctly, then your support button should display in your sidebar menu …

(Clickable support button widget on blog sidebar)

The screenshot above shows ’click for help’ button added to a brand new WordPress site.

Step 7 – Test your widget.

The last step is to make sure that your links work. Test this by clicking on the graphic button. If you are taken to the support page, then your text widget has been set up correctly …

(Test the text widget to make sure it works)

Tips:

If you would like your contact page to open inside a new window when visitors click on the help (so they don’t leave the page they’re in), then change the button code from this:

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

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

(Adjust column width or reduce image size)

Extra Tips:

• If you don’t want your button image to be centered inside your sidebar, delete the <center> and </center> tags from the beginning and end of the code. The image will then align to the left.
• Link your contact button to any destination you want (e.g. to an external site, contact form, support forum, etc.) and change this anytime by replacing the code in the text widget.

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This is the end of section two of this tutorial about using WordPress widgets.

To view Part Three, click this link:

• How To Add Widgets To WordPress – Part Three

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