Starting out, theming from scratch – widgets?

  • Resolved markupninja

    (@markupninja)


    16 years, 7 months ago

    So, I just grabbed 2.6 and its the first time I’ve ever really dove into wordpress. I’ve done alot of other CMS coding before, but wordpress is a bit different.

    I’d like to do a theme from scratch, so I can learn all the in’s and out’s, and was immediately curious about the widgetized sidebar.

    I’m curious as to what makes a side bar widgetized. Is it simply the if check that looks for whether there is or isn’t the dynamic_sidebar function?

    Sample from Default:

    <?php 	/* Widgetized sidebar, if you have the plugin installed. */
					if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>

    I’ve searched a few places around WP.org and I’m just not finding something that definitively answers this, and I’m sorry if you’ve answered this a hundred times, but I figured the community was probably the best place to go for this. Plus, I’m so new that I really have no clue at all for what to really search for.

    Also, I’m curious, can you just not have a “sidebar” and still be able to drop plugins into an area per se? Like, if I wanted a div to be widgetized on the home page after the blog posts or something? Do I just drop the function check in a div and I’m done with it?

    I’ve got a whole slew of questions, but I think if I get this answered, I’ll be able to have some better knowledge of what to search for and how this works.

    Thanks a million, I’ve heard great things about this community, so thanks in advance.

    Sincerely,
    Ken Hanson

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  • This would be a good read to get you started.

    https://automattic.com/code/widgets/themes/

    You can drag widgets into not only your sidebar but also other containers or DIVs. With a normal widget, it is quite standard to have a UL LI kind of structure, with a DIV it is slightly different. But that link kind of delivers an in depth explanation so take a look and hopefully your questions are answered. If not, feel free to ask.

    Thread Starter markupninja

    (@markupninja)

    Wow, thanks man! What a great link, perfectly answered my questions. Totally awesome, thanks again!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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