Sidebars & Widgets

Widgets

Widgets are predefined boxes of content that you can place in ‘sidebar’ areas on your site. These are set up under Appearance > Widgets in the WordPress admin.

Widget Areas

There are several different widget areas in the PageLines themes. These widget areas are placed in different parts of the theme. The following will go over each widget area in detail.

Sidebars in the PlatformPro Framework

Using Widgetized Sidebar Sections

In PlatformPro, sidebars are managed through drag and drop sections (each widgetized sidebar is a section).

This changes the capability of sidebars and makes them much more flexible. For example, you can place several sidebars in your ‘sidebar1′ template-area and hide and show them using ‘section control’.

With Base Child theme 1.0.4 we added a section (Base Sidebar) that shows you how to add an unlimited number of drag/drop widgetized sidebar areas using custom sections.

Sidebars In Standard PageLines WordPress Themes

iBlogPro4, WhiteHousePro3, StationPro3, EcoPro

Main Sidebar

This is the widget area that appears in your sidebar by default. Drag and drop any number of widgets into this area as you need.

Secondary Sidebar

The Secondary Sidebar widget area is intended as a replacement for the Main Sidebar on selected pages. For example, if you’d like a specific set of widgets only to replace the Main Sidebar widgets on certain pages, you would use this sidebar. For the pages you’d like to set to use the Secondary Sidebar, mark this in the Page Options in the Page Editor.

Content Sidebar & Full-Width Bottom Sidebar

The Content Sidebar resides in the page content area of your site. This sidebar is empty by default. If you add widgets to this widget area, widgets will be appended to the content section of your page. The Full-Width Bottom Sidebar is essentially the same, however, it clears both the content and the main sidebar. Screenshot of PlatformPro using the content and fullwidth sidebars.

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Morefoot Sidebars

The Morefoot footer (also called “widgetized footer sidebars”) area is comprised of three different widget areas: footer_left, footer_middle, footer_right. Each widget area is meant to only hold one widget. Drag and drop widgets into these containers. They look like this and appear just above the main footer:

The Footer Widget Area (5-columns)

The footer content can be changed in two ways. If you like the content placed in the default footer you can simply replace each portion in the theme options. The Footer Logo, the “more statement”, and the “site terms statement” are changed in the Footer Options panel. The other two columns are specific menu locations that can be assigned with custom menus using WP3.0. (If you do not specify the default value will be used, in Platform this is “Pages” and “Recent Posts” ( Latest).

If you are looking for a more fine-tuned and custom footer you can do so using widgets, however, you must replace all five columns with five new widgets to get it to fill out appropriately. In other words you can’t use the Footer Logo option or the Copyright Statement option and also place a widget via the widgets panel because there is no way for the theme to assume or detect which column you are trying to replace with the widget.

You can add widgets to the footer by dragging and dropping widgets into the “Footer Sidebars (5-column)” section. The footer widgets looks like this:

Why are widgets appearing in my sidebars even though my widget containers are empty?

Each widget area will display a default widget or widgets when left empty (so you know what is active).

To turn off this feature, check the option to Hide Widget Areas When Empty in the Theme Settings > “Sidebar Options” panel.