The sidebar of your site (the column of extra content that runs down the side of the page) is controlled by “widgets” (Pronounced wid-jit).

Widget is a silly word, but they’re very useful and very easy to use. Each widget could be thought of as an item in your sidebar. You might have an item for listing your categories, another for letting people subscribe to the site, and another for your search box.

There’s no limit to what you can do with them, so let’s get stuck right in!

How to Set Up Your Sidebar

• In the WordPress dashboard, navigate to Appearance > Widgets.
• Look at the image below to see labels of what each section here is (click the image to see it in full size!)

• To add a widget, just click on the grey title bar of that widget in the “Available Widgets” section, then hold the mouse button down and drag the widget into place in the appropriate widget area (the sections on the right-hand side of the page).
• When you first drop the widget into place, its options window will open up if it has one. Feel free to set any settings you like here and click “Save.” If you want to edit those settings again later, just click the arrow next to that widget’s name.

And that really is all there is to it! To re-arrange or drag widgets between sections, just click down on the grey bar and drag them around again!

WordPress comes with a number of default widgets. We’ve also built in a number of custom-made widgets for you (All starting with “Ply” in the name), which you can read about here. If you want to add more widgets though, just check out the WordPress plugin repository!

A good thing to know is that you can have multiple uses of a single type of widget, e.g. if you use the Ply Post List widget to list posts from your “News” category, you can easily drag on another Ply Post List widget to show a list of your “Review” posts as well.

Using PHP/Custom Code in Your Sidebar

If you’re used to editing a sidebar.php file in WordPress themes, you may be worried that widgets are going to limit you. Thankfully though, that’s just not the case!

If you’d like to add your own PHP to the sidebar (Or even add a template tag from another plugin into a sidebar widget!), you should install the PHP Code Widget plugin.

This plugin means that you can now enter PHP in a regular Text Widget, and it will be executed and displayed as you would expect it to!