Tag: Widgets

In Part 1 of this tutorial, we explained the basics of using WordPress widgets.

In this section you will learn how to begin configuring a number of widgets in WordPress.

Widget Configuration

In a default WordPress installation, your site comes with a number of built-in widgets that can be used out of the box with little to no configuration needed, such as widgets that let you display external links, filter posts by categories, RSS feed content, add tag clouds, etc.

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

How To Set Up Frequently-Used WordPress Widgets On The Sidebar Menu: Tutorial

In this tutorial series, we are going to add, configure and reorder a number of commonly-used WordPress widgets to display in your site’s sidebar, including:

• Adding a clickable Help graphic button linking visitors to your contact details page.
• Adding a Categories section with a drop down menu.
• Adding a Recent Posts section.
• Adding a list of your site’s Pages.
• Display important Links on your sidebar navigation section.
• Displaying a newsfeed with an RSS Feed section.
• Add a Tag Cloud section.
• Adding and configuring an Archives section to the sidebar.

To access the Widgets panel go to Appearance > Widgets …

(WordPress Widgets Menu)

This brings up the Widgets section in your browser window …

(Widgets Panel)

Let’s get started …

Adding Text Widgets

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 the sidebar or other widget sections, such as events, image links, news and updates and more to your site … just by typing in text or pasting HTML into the widget content area. You can also give the widget a title. Remember to save your settings …

(Text widgets are really versatile!)

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

For this example, let’s set up a support button on your sidebar navigation section 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 “help button” graphic image that you will want your visitors to click on …

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

Step 1 – Upload your image.

To display the clickable image on your site, you must first upload the button image to the images folder in your server and note the address of your server’s image location.

E.g. …

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

This information will be required in Step 3.

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

Step 2 – Add the destination page.

Create a contact page and note down its URL …

Step 3 – Compose your text widget code.

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

Your instructions can be composed in a simple text file 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 above with the URL of your image location.

The image below shows the sections of the above code that you 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 with basic HTML code, see this tutorial:

• Using Formatting Content With HTML In WordPress

Now, go back into your Widgets section …

(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, find the Text widget …

(WordPress text widget)

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

(Drag and drop your Text widget)

Step 5 – Configure your text widget.

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

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

Note: Remember to check all URLs before pasting scripts into your Text Widget, or the button will not work.

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

If adding text with no formatting tags, 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 paste in HTML code like we’re using in the example for this tutorial).

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

(Automatically add paragraphs option not checked)

Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs box checked …

(Automatically add paragraphs box ticked)

***

Step 6 – Refresh your browser.

Once you have added the widget and HTML code, go to the front end of your site and refresh your browser. If you have entered all of the links correctly, then the clickable support button should display in your site’s sidebar menu …

(Clickable button widget on sidebar)

The above screenshot shows the support contact button added to a brand new WordPress site.

Step 7 – Test your widget.

The final step is to make sure that the links work. Test this by clicking the help button. You should be taken directly to the contact page …

(Test your clickable button to make sure you’ve set everything up correctly)

Text Widgets – Useful Tips:

If you would like 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 button code from this:

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

When inserting images into your sidebar section, make sure that the width of your 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 may be too wide or too narrow. If your theme’s sidebar is narrower than the width of the graphic images, then you may have to either adjust the graphic size, or the column width to make graphics display correctly on your sidebar area.

(Make sure the image width does not exceed the sidebar column width)

Additional Tips:

• If you don’t want to center the image in the sidebar, delete the <center> and </center> tags from the beginning and end of the line of code. The image will then be aligned to its default settings (normally left-aligned).
• Link the help button to any destination you want (e.g. to an external site, helpdesk, support forum, etc.) and change this anytime by replacing the links in the widget.

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This is the end of section 2 of this tutorial about using Widgets.

To keep reading, click here:

• Adding WordPress Widgets To The Blog Sidebar Menu – Part 3

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