How to Add Widgets to your WordPress Themes

Adding widgets to a WordPress theme is a fantastic way to make things really easy to customise for the people who use the theme. Below is a really quick explanation of how to add them to your own themes.

Creating widget areas is actually really simple – there are only two steps in the process. The first is initializing the widget area, and the second is inserting the widgets into your theme.

Initialisation#

You can actually use one of two functions to create widget sidebars, register_sidebar and register_sidebars. I prefer register_sidebar as this allows you to create multiple sidebars with different settings for each one.

$args = array (
    'name' => 'Sidebar Name',
    'id' => 'sidebar-id',
    'description' => 'Sidebar Description (shown in the Widget admin)',
    'before_widget' => '<li id=\"%1$s\" class=\"widget %2$s\">',
    'after_widget' => '</li>',
    'before_title' => '<h2 class=\"widgettitle\">',
    'after_title' => '</h2>'
);

The description is a new property – added in WordPress 2.9. It’s a nice little addition that allows you to describe where and how the widget bar will be used in the theme.

Execution#

Execution is easy. To execute the widget created in the code above you just have to pass the widget id to the dynamic_sidebar function.

dynamic_sidebar ('sidebar-id');

Full details on the WordPress Widgets API is available on the WordPress Codex.

Ben

Ben is a lifelong Nintendo fan who likes to build websites, and make video games. He buys way too much Lego.