add widgets in the header

Hi Ziabelle, you can add new widget areas in any theme, if you’re comfortable with making some edits in your child theme. Here are some guides to adding new widgetized areas to a theme:

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Widgetizing_Themes
https://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-register-new-widget-areas-to-your-wordpress.html

Hi Kathryn
thanks for your quick answer.
I followed the instructions in the provided links. But doing so, it breaks my site when I work on the functions.php file.
As I created a child theme, I have understood that I need to create another functions.php and not change the parent theme file.

So I created a new functions.php file with this code inside :
<?php
register_sidebar( array (
‘name’ => __( ’header_widget’),
‘id’ => ‘header_widget’,
‘description’ => __( ‘Widget in the header’),
‘before_widget’ => ‘<li id=”%1$s” class=”widget-container %2$s”>’,
‘after_widget’ => “”,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h3 class=”widget-title”>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h3>’,
) );
?>

but when I go back to my administration panel, the page is white, it’s breaking the whole thing.
I’m probably making a very obvious mistake, but I ‘m new with this editing changes.

The reason that happened is that the widget function in Sketch is not “pluggable” – it’s not wrapped in a ! function_exists check – so it can’t just be copied into the child theme’s functions file.

Only “pluggable” functions that are wrapped in a conditional tag to check whether the same function already exists elsewhere can be overriden in the child theme by just re-declaring them.

Because of this, it becomes more complicated to override the widget setup in your child theme. You’ll need to add a new function to remove the default widget setup function in Sketch, and then add a new function called something else to create your new widget setup.

You can learn more about pluggable functions here:

https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/understanding-wordpress-pluggable-functions-and-their-usage–wp-30189