Widgeting a Non-widget Theme

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.