You can manage multiple sidebar widgets in WordPress. To do so, you go to the Widgets page in the Admin, and select the Sidebar you want to manage. If you have 1 widgetized sidebar, the name “Sidebar 1″ is not a big deal for managing it. But what if you have 5 or more, and they’re named Sidebar 1, Sidebar 2, etc. Ah yes, now what was that wily sidebar 3 for?

Why would someone have so many sidebars to begin with? Well, remember that you can also add widget-ready sidebars to WordPress footers or anywhere in your design, to give extra content management options to clients.

Recently, we had a client with way too many widgetized sidebars to keep track of, so we had to find a new solution to change the standard widget sidebar names like “sidebar 1″ or “sidebar 2″ to something more meaningful like “Left sidebar” and “Right sidebar” in the admin area. I dug around the web and found 2 very helpful posts:

• How to use widgets with more than one sidebar on your WordPress blog
• How to design a variable sidebar WordPress theme with widgets (by guest blogger Daria Black)

Here’s what I learned:

1. Go into your themes’s function.php file, or if it doesn’t exist, create it.

Add the following code:

<?php

if (function_exists(‘register_sidebar’))

{

register_sidebar(array(

‘before_widget’ => ‘<li>’,

‘after_widget’ => ‘</li>’,

‘before_title’ => ‘<h4>’,

‘after_title’ => ‘</h4>’,

‘name’ => ‘Left sidebar’

));

register_sidebar(array(

‘before_widget’ => ‘<li>’,

‘after_widget’ => ‘</li>’,

‘before_title’ => ‘<h4>’,

‘after_title’ => ‘</h4>’,

‘name’ => ‘Right sidebar’

));

}

?>

2a. Add a widgetized sidebar to your theme. Open up your theme’s sidebar file (for exampe, l_sidebar.php) and look for the first <ul> or <ul id=”sidebar”> or something similar, and add the following code:

<?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(‘Left sidebar’) ) : ?>

2b. If your sidebar is already widgetized, find the following code

<?php if ( function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : else : ?>

and replace it with

<?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(‘Left sidebar’) ) : ?>

Then, find the closing </ul> at the very bottom of the file, and immediately before that, place

<?php endif; ?>

3. Now, if you go into your admin panel, under Design>Widgets, you’ll see the new names like in the image below.

Now you can easily manage your Widgets without trying to guess which one is which.

This post was originally published at How to rename widgetized sidebars in WordPress on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

One of the reasons I hesitated to use widgets is because there are many useful plugins that aren’t widgets and demand that you add a snippet of code to your sidebar, something you can’t really do with widgets.

Well, now you can widgetize your sidebar and add both widgets and non-widget plugins to it with the Custom Functions Widgets plugin.

When activated, this plugin creates 20 empty widgets. To use one of them for a non-widget plugin, you drag one onto the sidebar, and then edit the widget’s options as follows:

1. Give it a title.
2. Name the function you want to call.
3. Enter the arguments to pass.
4. HTML to display before the output of the function
5. HTML to display after the output of the function
6. Option to hide the title of the widget (which you specified as Widget title) during the output
7. Option to remove the default wrapper of the widget (as defined in template.php of your theme’s folder, for each sidebar)
8. Close the widget options pop-up and click ‘Save Changes’

Now your sidebar can handle all types of plugins and widgets!

WordPress Plugin: Custom Function Widgets

This post was originally published at Easily add unwidgetized WordPress plugins to widgetized sidebar with Custom Function Widgets plugin on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

The challenge is coordinating all of the places that we appear on the web. Previously we discussed possible ways to combine your blog with facebook. You could also use add the ShowYourself Widget to your blog sidebar, which allows you to collect and display your online identities on various community sites in one place. Here’s a sample:

ShowYourself Widget

This post was originally published at Display your web identity with the ShowYourself Widget on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Yedda is an Israeli start up with a web-based questions and answer service that is generally agreed to rival that of Yahoo Answers. Yedda’s technology powers many independent Q&A services as well, including ePals and TheJobNetwork (via TechCrunch). In early November, Yedda was acquired by AOL for an undisclosed amount, making it the second Israeli company to be acquired by AOL in a matter of weeks (the first one was Quigo.)

I first met Lior Haner, the head of Yedda’s Community Marketing, at WordCamp Israel in October. He contacted me recently to tell me about Yedda’s new Feedflare modules that allow bloggers to add a specific Yedda FeedFlare to their feeds that allow readers to ask questions about specific blog posts.

(Image from the Yedda blog)

The idea sounded interesting, but I had some reservations about something that would move discussion about a blog post to another site, since bloggers are notoriously protective of any activity or traffic taking place around their blog’s content.

So I asked Lior if I could interview him about the FeedFlare modules to try to get a better picture, and to give you, my readers, a chance to respond and tell us what you think. He kindly agreed, so here it is:

WPG: Hi Lior! Thanks for agreeing to do an email interview about Yedda’s new Feedflare modules.

Lior: It’s a pleasure, I really believe that blogging is the best way to get information out and create a useful discussion.

WPG: First, can you tell our readers a little bit about Yedda?

Lior: Yedda is a place for people to find answers to their questions. Before the internet age, people with questions first tried to seek out the most qualified person in the question’s topic in order to get an answer. On Yedda, anyone can post a question and tell the story behind it and include any relevant links, images or videos. Then, we match that question with people who have the relevant knowledge out of the Yedda community and invite them to answer that question. This basically creates people-powered search that helps you get better results that aren’t available or difficult to achieve on search engines.

In contrast to most other Q&A sites, Yedda is a platform that can be accessed from Yedda.com, from blogs using Yedda blog widgets, FeedFlare or from Yedda partner sites.

WPG: Can you tell us about the FeedFlare modules, what they do and how they can benefit bloggers?

Lior: FeedFlare is a product by Feedburner, who many bloggers use to keep track of their blog’s stats. FeedFlares are little links at the end of your posts that are visible in your RSS feed and can also be added to your blog’s template. In your feed you have FeedFlare elements that let your readers E-mail, save to Delicious, etc. Yedda has created a custom FeedFlare element that lets readers ask a question on Yedda about your post. The question includes a prominent link to your blog and can attract new readers from the Yedda community. Here is some more information on Yedda’s blog: http://blog.yedda.com/?p=130

WPG: How does it solve the problem of bloggers wanting conversations to take place on their blog?

Lior: Although the questions are asked on Yedda, they include a prominent link back to your blog that both attracts new readers and is good for SEO. If you interact with your readers on Yedda and add your blog’s URL to your Yedda profile, you can create your own knowledge community and promote yourself on Yedda’s network. Using Yedda’s widgets you can create more interaction between Yedda and your blog and span the conversation over both venues.

WPG: Is Yedda widely used, i.e. is there a benefit to bloggers to gain exposure on the Yedda site? Can you give us some statistics?

Lior: Yedda has a growing community of askers and answerers and is currently one of the world’s leading Q&A sites. At the end of 2007 AOL announced it had acquired Yedda and that Yedda’s offering will be gradually added to many AOL sites. Yedda’s approach is that you can ask or answer from anywhere and you will be visible from anywhere. This means that links to your blog on Yedda have a potential of reaching millions of AOL users in your topics of interest.

WPG: Have people started to use the FeedFlares, and if so, how is the response? Do people actually click on them?

Lior: Yedda FeedFlares are a new offering but we have received some great feedback. People use both the FeedFlares and the widgets, and blog owners have reported an increase in the exposure they get from Yedda.

WPG: Can you tell me about some of the other widgets you offer to bloggers?

Lior: Here is an introduction to Yedda widgets: http://yedda.com/blogger. Yedda widgets let your readers ask questions, view relevant Q&A about the topics of your blogs and see what answers you gave in your topics of knowledge.

WPG: As you mentioned, Yedda was recently acquired by AOL. Is this going to affect the blogger services you provide, and if so, how?

Lior: The most dramatic effect will be that Yedda will continue growing quickly. The fact that many new people will join Yedda or be exposed to Yedda’s Q&A in AOL and other sites means more exposure for blogs or people promoting knowledge topics on Yedda. We also plan to continue developing our blogger offering and launching great new products.

WPG: Anything else you would like to mention?

Lior: I also wanted to mention that Yedda supplies content sites and publishers with a full-fledged customizable Q&A platform. The Yedda platform is currently integrated into AOL sites and is already up and running in many partner sites (Here are some examples: http://www.epals.com, http://articlesbase.com, http://www.filesrating.com). Here is some more information about Yedda’s partner program: http://yedda.com/partners.

If you want to inquire about Yedda’s offering, I’ll be happy to help: .

WPG: Thanks Lior!

———————————–

So what do you think? Do you think that Yedda’s FeedFlares will catch on?

More on Yedda:

• “Yedda” is the Hebrew word for knowledge.
• Yedda’s first exposure on TechCrunch and then the follow up when it came out of beta.
• Yedda on Facebook
• Kara Swisher from BoomTown on Yedda’s acquisition by AOL: “AOL: Yadda, Yadda, Yedda?“.
• YeddaTeam’s photos on flickr – see the people behind the company.

This post was originally published at Interview with Yedda’s head of Community Marketing about new Feedflare modules for bloggers on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

A little while ago one of the commenters here asked if I knew how to display shared items from Google Reader in a blog, such as in the sidebar. David Paul Robinson explains how to put a “clip” on your blog that contains your shared items. You could probably also use one of WordPress’ feed widgets or plugins to display your Shared items RSS feed on  your site.
Using Google Reader For Your Link Blog>>

This post was originally published at Share your Shared items from Google Reader in your blog on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

In an earlier post, I wrote about my quest to find a way to easily allow users to modify text in the sidebar of a site I was creating. After trying a few different options, I happily settled on the Improved Include Page plugin.

Then I started trying to add all sorts of social stuff to the blog part of the site, such as the Sociable icons for bookmarking, and the option to email a post to a friend, or print a printer-friendly version. The problem is that if you select to have the sociable bookmarks appear on Pages, and you insert the PHP code for the print and email functions on Pages, it conflicts with the bit in the sidebar which is also, in essence, a Page.

After playing around with it for a bit, I realized I needed a different solution to the editable text in the sidebar, and decided to try to go with widgets.

The Need: I needed to be able to insert a text widget so that users could easily edit the text within it, but I needed to keep the rest of the information that appears in the sidebar, such as the posts from a certain category, since as far as I know there are no widgets that allow you to display posts from one category only. I also needed the text in the widget to appear with the same styles as the rest of the sidebar.

The Solution:

First I made the site widget-ready. This is very easy, and involves only a few steps:

1. Download the widgets plugin. Upload the entire widgets folder to your plugins directory. Activate.
2. Create a file called functions.php. Put the following code in the file and upload (make sure there are no spaces before or after the code – that can be deadly!):
   <?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar();
?>
3. Since I wanted most of the sidebar text to remain as is, I modified my sidebar as follows:
   <form id="searchform" method="get" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>">
<input type="text" name="s" id="s" value="search and press enter..."/></form>
<?php if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar() ) : else : ?>
<?php endif; ?><h2>News</h2>
<ul>
...
   This kept my search bar at the top, inserted a place for the widgets, and then after that the rest of the sidebar appears as is.
4. The widgets plugin that was installed in step 1 creates a menu under Presentation>Sidebar Widgets. I went there, and dragged a text widget onto the Sidebar. I then clicked on the box on the right, and entered the title in the title field, and the text in the text box with HTML tags.
5. Everything looked good, but next to the title was an annoying bullet that obviously emanated from an unwanted <li> list tag that had been added. The question was – where did it come from? I scoured the web looking for an answer, and found a hint on this page under the section called “My sidebar isn’t a list. What do I do?” It explained that it styles the widget with <li> tags. I opened widgets.php in the widgets folder under plugins, and changed lines 52 and 53 as follows:
   'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => "</div>\n",
   I changed the places where it said li to div. It worked like a charm.

Now I had easily editable text in the sidebar, plus I could freely use the Sociable, e-mail and print plugins as I pleased.

This post was originally published at Inserting editable text in the sidebar – part II: Widgets on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

LinkedInABox™ is a simple widget that can be embedded on any web page and provides a summary of your personal profile, as presented in your LinkedIn account.

LinkedInABox>>

This post was originally published at LinkedInABox on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Create a custom Google search results page within your WordPress blog with widgets and this plugin.

Custom Google Search Results Page on Your WordPress with Adsense Deluxe>>

This post was originally published at Custom Google Search Results Page on Your WordPress with Adsense Deluxe on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

WordPress Widgets (WPW) is a plugin designed to provide a simple way to arrange the various elements of your sidebar content without having to change any code.

Widget Themes and Widgets>>

This post was originally published at Themes that use widgets, and the widgets you can use on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Alpesh Nakar gives really simple instructions on how to take your non-widget theme and make it widget-ready. So far widgets and I haven’t gotten along very well, but who knows, maybe one day I’ll become a follower…

HowTo: Convert Non-Widget to Widget Ready WordPress Theme>>

This post was originally published at How to convert a non-widget theme to a widget-ready one on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.