Updated :: Make Your Wordpress Themes Wigitized

Most of the themes available now a days are wigitized but there are a few really good ones that are not wigitized.In this tutorial I’ll show how you can wigitize a WP Theme, which can make it really easy to manage the sidebars of a WP Theme.

To check if your theme is widget ready or not just head to Design -> Widgets.

Which means your theme is not widget enable.

Follow these steps to enable widgets for your theme.

1. Create a file functions.php in your theme directory.
   

   <?php

   if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )

       register_sidebar();

   ?>

   If you want 1 side bar

   [ OR ]

   <?phpif ( function_exists('register_sidebars') )register_sidebars(2);?>

   If you want multiple sidebars.You can replace 2 with any number.

2. After doing that go to Design -> Widgets and you can find this
3. Now displaying the sidebars in your theme, open your sidebar.php present in your template theme, look for the unordered list like in the example below and add this text right after the <ul> tag.

   <?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')

        || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>

4. And finally close the if loop with the endif before the closing unordered list tag</ul>.<?php endif; ?>
5. For example like this

<ul id="sidebar-right">

<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')

     || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>

                <li><h2>Categories</h2></li>

        <?php wp_list_categories(); ?>

    <?php endif; ?>

</ul>

NOTE : If you more than one sidebar, the you have to give the sidebar number in the function like this

<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')

     || !dynamic_sidebar(2) ) : ?>

Here the 2 is the sidebar number.If there is no number mentioned then the first sidebar is used.

UPDATE : Wigitize the footer

TechUpdates in the comments asked whether the footer can be wigitized.So here’s how we can wigitize the footer

Step 1: open the functions.php that we created above and add the following lines after the register_sidebar() or register_sidebars(2)

    register_sidebar(Array("name" => "bottomleft"));

    register_sidebar(Array("name" => "bottommiddle"));

    register_sidebar(Array("name" => "bottomright"));

for Example :

<?phpif ( function_exists(’register_sidebars’) )

register_sidebars(2);

register_sidebar(Array("name" => "bottomleft"));

register_sidebar(Array("name" => "bottommiddle"));

register_sidebar(Array("name" => "bottomright"));

?>

Step 2 :Open the theme folder and look for footer.php

          In the file look where the footer div block starts and add these lines

<?php if ( !function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’)|| !dynamic_sidebar(’bottomleft’) ) : ?>

<?php endif; ?>

The footer div block would look start with something like this

<div class="footer-box">

If the footer has some functions by default, you can leave them as is.The wigets will replace the default.

For Ex.

<div class="footer-box">

<?php if ( !function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’)|| !dynamic_sidebar(’bottommiddle’) ) : ?>

<ul>

<?php get_recent_comments(); ?>

</ul>

<?php endif; ?>

</div>

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!