Configuring Widgets

Widgets extend WordPress by allowing you to add and remove navigation items from areas on your website, called sidebars. If you are looking into the WordPress documentation or forums you may see ‘dynamic sidebars’ referred to, these are the sidebars that allow for widgets. Read more about Widgets on the WordPress codex.

WPFolio features 3 custom widgets.

WPFolio’s Dynamic Sidebars

There are four widget areas in WPFolio.

Sidebar

Sidebar is a second sidebar which appears on the right hand (starting with WPFolio version 1.5) when you have a “Blog” section or page

Sidebar is only enabled on pages that are titled News, Latest, Blog, etc. These are pages which look and function like a blog. Widgets you may want to add to this sidebar are Links, Blogroll, a Tag Cloud, etc.

Widgets appear in the order you specify.

Adding your links to the sidebar

• You can use this area to create links for collaborators, supporting organizations, etc. The WordPress Administration Panel handles links for you. You will probably want to delete the existing links (installed by default) and add links of your own.
• First step is to create a new Link Category in the Administration Panel (watch a brief video about arranging links into categories and another brief video on editing links), this is covered in the wordpress.org support documents on links.Add relevant links to the category. For example, create a category called Fellow Artists and add links to your artists colleagues.
• Then go back to the widgets section, and add the links widget to the sidebar.
• If you do not want the Links section to appear simply do not add the Links widget.

Footer Left, Footer Right, and Footer Center

Footer Left appears on the left hand side of your footer. Footer Right appears on the right hand side. Footer Center appears above Footer Left and Footer right and can span the width of the page. WPFolio features 2 custom widgets designed for these areas:

Add RSS, Credits to Footer

This widget creates linked images for your RSS feed for posts and comments. You can select one or the other or both. It also gives you the option of including credits for WordPress, Eyebeam, and WPFolio. Entirely optional, no obligation or guilt.

License and Name in Footer

This widget allows you to choose any from the suite of excellent Creative Commons licenses as well as the restrictive standard Copyright license. If you don’t know about Creative Commons licenses, check them out. You want your work spread far and wide (and you want to be credited) just like you would with a postcard or any other promotional communications material. Consider a Creative Commons license. But read up, once you choose you can’t go back!

The widget also includes an area for you to include your name (or the license holder).

Related Videos

Widgets Overview from WordPress.TV

Deprecated

Navbar (versions prior to WPFolio 1.6)

Note: This is no longer used. WPFolio now uses the WordPress menu feature. Read about it!

Navbar is short for navigation bar. It is the horizontal navigation that is on the top of every page of your WPFolio site.

Changing Navbar

Navigate to Widgets under the Appearance tab in the WordPress Dashboard.

Select navbar from the current widgets dropdown menu. Then select the widgets from the column on the left and drag them to the column on the right. WPFolio allows you to add Pages,WPFolio Categories, and WPFolio Yearly Archives. These three widgets create the navigation tabs for your website. You will want to avoid adding other widgets to the navbar unless you are committed to modifying the theme and/or style sheet, because the widget you add may not appear correctly.

Adding Widgets to the Navbar

• The order of the widgets in the widget menu is the order they will appear, left to right, on your website. So if you want categories to appear first in your navigation menu you would want to place the category widget first in the widget column.

WPFolio Categories Widget

• WPFolio comes with a handy custom widget to organize categories in the navigation once you have created them. This widget allows you to enter category names in the order you want them to appear.
• Add the widget to the Navbar area and enter the category name exactly as it appears (PHOTOGRAPHY if it is capitalized) or enter the category name in all lowercase, this is called a category slug. For example if the category is named Photography the slug is likely to be called photography.