WordPress 24-Hour Trainer, 3rd Edition

Lesson 21Managing Widgets and Menus

In the preceding lessons you worked with content that appears in the main body of your website, but WordPress makes it easy to control the content in the sidebar and other areas of the layout without having to know HTML or other coding. That's the purpose of Widgets. This lesson shows you how widgets work and how they can work for you.

WordPress recently added a menu system that makes creating and managing navigation areas as simple as using widgets. This lesson shows you how to create new menus and then manage the items on those menus.

Widgets and Widget Areas

Widgets are elements outside the main content area of a web page that users can easily add, delete, and move around. A Widget might produce a list of all your blog categories; another might be a text box where you can update all your contact information; and yet another could contain the coding your mailing list manager provides for inserting a sign-up form.

Some Widgets come with WordPress, some are created by your theme, and still others appear when you install a plugin. There are literally thousands of possible free Widgets available through the Plugin Directory at WordPress.org and many more through paid plugins.

Widgets vary widely in complexity. Some have dozens of settings, whereas others you simply turn off or on. But no matter how complex the Widget, they appear in your administration screen as a simple box that you just drag and drop. You drop them into Widget Areas that ...