I had a huge huge headache the last time when I didn’t have widgets on my blog. So I’m revisiting this tutorial again. Basically what you have is a theme which is not widget ready.. ugh, even the mention of that sickens me. What I’m going to share is how to create a widget for your sidebar on your non-widget ready theme.First of all, please go to this site. This is the real guru for widgetizing a theme

What we would like is to have this page on wordpress.

 and not THIS!

When you find your sidebar.php.. it will have code that looks something like this – base on widget sidebar of Kubrick the classic wordpress theme.

<div id=”sidebar”>
<li id=”about”>
<h2>About</h2>
<p>This is my blog.</p>
</li>
<li id=”links”>
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href=”http://example.com”>Example</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>

Looks quite terrifying yes? No worries, then from here what you do is you just add these two lines into it.

<ul id=”sidebar”>
 <?php if ( function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar() ) : else : ?>
<li id=”about”>
<h2>About</h2>
<p>This is my blog.</p>
</li>
<li id=”links”>
<h2>Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href=”http://example.com”>Example</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>

That’s it! oh WAIT  no not yet!

You have to create a functions.php file for it if your theme doesn’t already have one. Don’t fret, just open up either dreamweaver or even a note pad and save the file as  functions.php and this is what you have to type in it

<?php
if ( function_exists(‘register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebar();
?> 

If you need more than one sidebar no probs just key this in.

 <?php
if ( function_exists(‘register_sidebars‘) )
register_sidebars(n);
?>

**(n) n refers to the number of widget sidebars you want to register.

If you look at the new wordpress 2 themes and above they would have a function page that looks like so

<?php
if ( function_exists(‘register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebar(array(
‘before_widget’ => ‘<li id=”%1$s” class=”widget %2$s”>’,
‘after_widget’ => ‘</li>’,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h2 class=”sidebartitle”>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h2>’,
));
?>

HAHHH???? what the heck where did that code come from?

I had another headache because, great now where am i going to add this section  register_sidebars(n) in? Well it was quite simple it seems, you just put the number here

<?php
if ( function_exists(‘register_sidebars‘) )
register_sidebars(n,array(
‘before_widget’ => ‘<li id=”%1$s” class=”widget %2$s”>’,
‘after_widget’ => ‘</li>’,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h2 class=”sidebartitle”>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h2>’,
));
?>

So yeah, that was my widget headache solution. Hope this helps out anyone out there.