An introduction to your sidebar positions

You can see them on the live demo site HERE or view the screenshot below:

Some sidebars are basic while others are dynamic (adjustable to available space) and some won’t show unless you turn them on from the customizer. With the Left and Right sidebars, you get two sets of each, one for the blog section of your site and one for actual pages:

  1. Blog Left Sidebar
  2. Blog Right Sidebar
  3. Page Left Sidebar
  4. Page Right Sidebar

This means that if you publish a widget to the Blog Right Sidebar, this will not show on the Page Right Sidebar…and vice versa. If you want the same widget to show on both, you will need to publish a new one to the Page Right Sidebar.

Sidebars with Dynamic Widths

I use this term “Dynamic Width” loosely, but basically what it means is that you get sidebars that will automatically adjust their widths based on how many widgets are published side-by-side within a sidebar group. For example, if your theme has the Top sidebar positions, you can have up to 4 widgets published side-by-side.

Here is what happens when you publish widgets to Bottom 1, Bottom 2, Bottom 3, and/or Bottom 4:

  • Publish 1 widget = 100% width
  • Publish 2 widgets = 50% width each
  • Publish 3 widgets = 33% width each
  • Publish 4 widgets = 25% width each

The above example and capability only works for sidebar groups which contain 4 sidebar positions that relate to each other. You will know when you have this because when you are logged into your dashboard and go to Widgets, you will see them like this example:

  • Content Top 1, Content Top 2, Content Top 3, Content Top 4
  • Content Bottom 1, Content Bottom 2, Content Bottom 3, Content Bottom 4
  • Bottom 1, Bottom 2, Bottom 3, Bottom 3
  • etc…

Screenshot example of the Bottom sidebar group:

All other sidebar positions are singles only.

Show Widgets on Select Pages Only

This is the other part of this introduction where you get redirected to another article that takes you through the process of showing widgets on select pages only. By default WordPress does not have this capability, so we have to use a plugin for this.

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