Widgets are blocks of content that can be shown in widget areas such the homepage, sidebars and footer.
Contents
Widget Areas
Each theme has different widget areas according to its design. Most of our themes have at least one of these widget areas.
- Homepage – Some of our themes show widgets on the homepage. See the Homepage guide for details.
- Footer – The theme you use may support widgets in the footer area.
- Sidebars – Several themes support a sidebar widget area.
Some of our themes incorporate optional sidebar widget areas into their design.
There are sidebars for different types of content. A sidebar is a column that shows to the side of the main content. It can be useful for navigation (e.g. sermon topics) and supplemental content (e.g. locations widget on the contact page). Some of our themes have the following sidebars.
- Page Sidebar – all regular pages
- Sermon Sidebar – page using the Sermons template, topics, books, single sermons, etc.
- Gallery Sidebar – pages using the Gallery or Galleries template, individual photos in a gallery
- Events Sidebar – page using one of the Events templates and single events
- People Sidebar – page using the People template, people groups and individual profiles
- Locations Sidebar – page using the Locations template and single locations.
- Blog Sidebar – page using the Blog template, categories, date archives, single posts, etc.
- Contact Sidebar – page using the Contact template
- Search Sidebar – search results
All regular pages (not using a template) use the Page Sidebar. Use a plugin like Simple Page Sidebars to create a custom sidebar for a specific page.
Setting Page Templates
The template a page used determines the sidebar it uses. You can set a page template in the Template section of the editor’s sidebar. Read Page Templates for more information.
A sidebar will not show if no widgets have been added to it. Sometimes you might have a sidebar with widgets but not want to show it on a specific page or post. When adding or editing the page or post, check the box for “Hide sidebar widgets” under Options in the Document panel.
Custom Widgets
WordPress comes with a set of standard widgets (tag cloud and recent comments, to name a few). Our themes add most of the following custom widgets.
- CT Archives – show sermon or blog archives by month (optionally as dropdown)
- CT Categories – show sermon topics, blog categories, etc. (optionally as dropdown)
- CT Events – show upcoming or past events
- CT Galleries – show all pages, posts, etc. that have a gallery
- CT Gallery – show photos from one or all galleries
- CT Giving – message and button linking to payment service of choice (by URL)
- CT Highlight – an image with title and description linking to any page
- CT Locations – show all locations
- CT People – show all people or people from a specific group
- CT Posts – show all blog posts or posts from a category, in any order
- CT Sermons – show all sermons or sermons by topic, book, series, etc.
- CT Section – show an entire section of content (Saved and Maranatha uses this on the homepage)
- CT Slide – for use on the homepage when the theme has a slider
Giving Widget
The Giving widget lets you create a button that links to an external payment service.
A popular choice is PayPal which offers donation buttons. After signing up for PayPal create a button then copy and paste its URL into the widget. When you create the button there is an option to give you a URL instead of HTML code. Here are instructions.
Read How can we handle giving? for more information. PayPal is not the only option.
Managing Widgets
Example of managing widgets in footer area
Adding a Widget
- Go to Appearance > Customize > Widgets.
- Choose a widget area.
- Click Add a Widget.
- Optionally modify the widget’s settings (if any).
- Repeat to add more widgets.
- Click Publish to save your changes.
Editing, Reordering and Deleting
- Click a widget’s title to expand its settings.
- To reorder, drag a widget above or below another.
- To delete, click a widget then look for Delete at the bottom.
Starter Widgets
A starter widgets file is included for each theme. You can import this file to have the same widgets you see in the demo. Read the Starter Content guide for instructions.
Child Theme Note
If you are going to make code customizations (not common) by switching to a child theme, be aware that the widgets you have configured in the parent theme may not be available in the child theme. You can manually reconfigure them or use our Widget Importer and Exporter plugin to export them when using the parent theme then import them after switching to the child theme.