When I installed the widgets plugin, my theme wasn’t widget enabled. I had to code the templates to accommodate the widgets information, as well as change the function.php to reflect my many and varied sidebars which I use throughout my site.
From what I can gather, you don’t wish to replace existing information in your sidebar with the widget plugin, merely display the widgets generated text and/or links beneath or above existing content?
I found placing the code really easy to do. I just selected an area in my sidebar and hard coded in an asides div to contain the widgets html output. I decided I would use only one [div class and/or id] for this global placement and use it throughout the site on multiple sidebars. Any id or class name will do.
The beauty is no matter where you put it (sidebar), if you declare margin-top to be, say, 50px from the ‘top’ it will always be 50px from anything that is directly above it, and that includes existing content and/or links.
So it can be switched around within the sidebar to sit at the very top or absolute last in the sidebar colum, and always retain 50px gap between information or text. Naturally, declaring margin-bottom may be useful, too.
something like:
[div id=”rightcol”]
[div id=”rightnav]
[ul]
[li]link[/li]
[/ul]
[/div] close rightnav
[div class=”asides”]
[div id=”text-1″ class=”widget widget_text”]
[p class=”subheading”]snappy line here[/p]
[ul]
[li]widget link[/li]
[/ul]
[/div] close text-1 – automatically inserted by plugin
[/div] close asides – hard-coded
[/div] close rightcol – hard-coded
In the template file, I hard coded the [div class=”asides”] then inserted directly after the opening html call, the dymanic function for the widgets. I closed the [div] (hard-coded) after the function.
In the functions.php I changed the output as per instructions…
{
register_sidebar(array(
'before_widget' => '[div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s"]',
'after_widget' => '[/div]',
'before_title' => '[p class="subheading"]',
'after_title' => '[/p]
',
'name'=>'articles-sidebar',
));
Does that help?
