Widgets

Widgets are small blocks of content and/or functions that can be displayed in certain "widgetized" areas (i.e., areas that support the use of widgets) of your site. Which areas of your site are widgetized will depend on the theme and theme layout you're using—most themes support the use of widgets in sidebars and footers. For example, this page has two widgets in its sidebar: a text widget displaying the list of WordPress tutorials, as well as a search widget.

Your COPLACDigital WordPress site comes with about 20 default widgets, some of which are more useful for blogs, while others are more useful for static sites. You'll find the widgets that are available to you from your Dashboard by choosing Appearance > Widgets. The Widgets screen has a list of available widgets, as well as short descriptions of what they do:

• Akismet — Displays the number of spam comments Akismet has blocked.
• Archives — A monthly archive of your site's posts.
• Audio — Displays an audio player.
• Calendar — A calendar of your site's posts.
• Categories — A list or dropdown of categories.
• Custom HTML — Arbitrary HTML code.
• Gallery — Displays an image gallery.
• Image — Displays an image.
• Links — Your blogroll.
• Meta — Login, RSS, and WordPress.org links.
• Navigation Menu — Add a navigation menu to your sidebar.
• Pages — A list of your site's pages.
• Recent Comments — Your site's most recent comments.
• Recent Posts — Your site's most recent posts.
• RSS — Entries from any RSS or Atom feed.
• Search — A search form for your site.
• Tag Cloud — A cloud of your most used tags.
• Text — Arbitrary text.
• Video — Displays a video from the media library or from YouTube, Vimeo, or another provider.

The widgets that you'll probably find most useful for your sites are: Search, Text, Navigation Menu, and Custom HTML. (But you are by no means limited to using just those!)

Your COPLACDigital site comes with about 20 widgets that are already available for use, but you can easily get access to more widgets by activating particular plugins or themes. (It's far more common for plugins to add new widgets than it is for themes to.)

For example, if you activate Jetpack, you'll get access to a whole suite of new widgets. As with the default widgets, you won't need to use all of the ones provided by Jetpack, but you might find a handful of useful ones to display on your site.

As with anything on your COPLACDigital site, the first thing you should ask yourself is Which widgets will be useful for my site and the work I'm displaying?

The answer to this question, of course, depends on which COPLACDigital site we're talking about. Since your personal course blog is a blog, the widgets you use there will most likely be different than the ones you use on your shared project site. Blog-oriented widgets such as Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, and Archives would be good widgets to display in a sidebar (or other widgetized area) of your personal site, as pictured below. However, it wouldn't make sense to use these widgets on your shared project site, especially since you aren't publishing posts there.

Other widgets, such as Search or Navigation Menu, are universally useful, so it makes sense to display them on either of your COPLACDigital sites.

Displaying widgets on your site is fairly straightforward and can be done quickly as you choose which widgets you want to use.

There are two places where you can configure and customize widgets for display: the Widgets screen (Appearance > Widgets) or the Customizer (Appearance > Customize). For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll be looking at the Widgets screen.

From your Dashboard, choose Appearance > Widgets from the main menu on the left. As noted in Step 1 of this tutorial, the Widgets screen shows you a list of available widgets, as well as short descriptions. On the right-hand side of the screen, you'll see a list of all the potential areas on your site where you can display widgets. Remember, the widgetized areas are dependent upon which theme you are using.

As you can see, this particular theme (Twenty Seventeen) has three different widgetized areas, two of them in the footer. Just because all of these areas are available for displaying widgets doesn't mean you have to use them all—use what works for you. (We recommend at least a sidebar.)

Adding Widgets

When you know which widget(s) you want to use and where you want to put them, you can just drag the widget of your choice from the left side over to the right side, under the name of the area where you want to put it. Do this for each widget that you want to use. Tip: You can use the same widget multiple times! Just drag it over again.

Alternatively, you can click on the widget of your choice on the left-hand side of the screen, and it will display a list of possible locations. Just choose the location you want and click "Add Widget."

Deleting Widgets

If you decide that you no longer want to use a certain widget, you can easily remove it from the widgetized area. On the right-hand side of the Widgets screen, simply click the down arrow next to the title of the widget.

This will expand the widget's interface, and you'll see a "Delete" option.

Click "Delete," and the widget will be removed from that particular area. (Note that it doesn't delete the widget as something available to you, so you'll still see it on the left-hand side of the screen under "Available Widgets.")

Once you've added a widget to the desired area, make sure you pop open the widget interface (using the down arrow to the right of the widget's name) and look at the options you have for configuring and customizing it.

Some widgets, such as Search, have very limited options for configuration and customization. Others, such as Links, have several more options.

VS.

As you go, choose the options for each widget that fit with what you need. If you're in the Widgets screen, make sure that you're clicking the blue "Save" button at the bottom right-hand corner of the widget to save the settings you've chosen. (If you're in the Customizer, it will be the blue "Publish" button at the top of the customization pane.) It's easy to go back in and change the configuration, too, if you find that the widget appears differently or isn't working as expected.

The Text Widget

Though seemingly simple and boring, the Text widget is one of the most flexible widgets in WordPress. It's essentially a tiny version of a post or page, and just like posts and pages, it has a visual and HTML editor. You can add images and other media in a Text widget (using the "Add Media" button in the widget), as well as use the visual editor to insert lists, links, text, and much more. The HTML side is useful for embedding content (or simply adding things that are easier to work with in HTML and than in rich text).

For example, the WordPress Tutorials menu in the right-hand sidebar of this page is actually a Text widget, not a Navigation Menu widget. We didn't like WordPress's styling of the Navigation Menu through the widget, so we just used the HTML side of the Text widget instead. Using the HTML side gave us the flexibility to stye the appearance exactly as we wanted, including the use of icons.

• WordPress Widgets
• Appearance Widgets Screen