Widgets Not Showing Up After Activation

I noticed unlike another site I have, under Dashboard, I don’t have the Widget Selector option showing. Does that mean the theme is not widget-ready? But I don’t get the error with the info on how to make it widget-ready on this BlackCream theme. Any tips on what to do? Thanks.

Now, this may be a stupid question, but did you click “Save Changes” after adding the widget? I find myself doing this all the time, adding a widget and forgetting to hit save.

Can you look in your theme’s sidebar.php file (or one of its relatives, like left_sidebar.php, like you mentioned) for code similar to the following:

if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) :

I know you said you don’t get an error message about it not being widget-ready, but check anyway.

Also, can you check to see if the widget shows up when using the Default (Kubrick) theme?

I wanted to note that I added the wp-dash widget, so now I have the Widget Selector option. But something is still funky with the widgets themselves on this site. I don’t think it is theme-specific as I have tried switching BlackCream with other widget-ready themes.

Thanks Jeremy for the suggestion. I tried the Default theme, and yes, the widget shows up. I did some more looking at the theme files and both sidebar and left_sidebar.php have the snippet of code you mention above.

The problem is that the theme coder put what I would call the left sidebar code in the header. So all the stuff you see on the left sidebar (categories, etc.) is coded in the header file. The right sidebar file has the widget code in it too, as well as blogroll, etc. But neither of these sidebar files are being used in the template. The header file is in place of the left sidebar and the google ad strip is in place of the right. And these don’t have the widget code.

I like this theme for aesthetic reasons, but it seems like there are a whole bunch of overlapping files here and that stuff that should go in sidebar is in the header. The code is kind of all over the place and hard to follow.

Is there a way to insert the widget code you quoted above in the header file (which is actually my left sidebar) or is that bad form?

I’m trying some other themes. I think that BlackCream is just wonky. It’s hard to find a good dark theme that is also organized. That one isn’t it. I may just use something else, instead of sorting through (or asking for help) with the code.

I had similar problems with another theme as well,
I got it fixed by checking and setting the right file permissions via FTP, also you should clear your browsers cache.

KCCNET