Widget problems (or is it?)

  • Resolved football-grrl

    (@football-grrl)


    15 years, 5 months ago

    I have been having problems with widgets – the drop and drag feature in the admin/appearance/widgets area. I could not drop and drag widgets because when I did – the widget disappeared in the sidebar once I went to view. Someone suggested I switch themes so I went to the “default” theme and still had problems. Now I switched to another theme and it seemed to be working. So I switched back to the first theme I had – and it still seems to be working. Does anyone know if this feature is just a little glitchy, or would upgrading to the 2.8.5 help? Thanks…

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Upgrading to the latest wordpress will certainly help with security, but it seems that it wouldn’t fix your problem. Themes need to be “widget enabled” to work with this drag and drop feature, so unless a theme adds support for it the feature won’t work even if you upgrade to 2.8.5.

    You could possibly “widgetize” the theme you wanted, but it’s a bit technical: see here for instructions.

    Thread Starter football-grrl

    (@football-grrl)

    Thank you for that. How can I tell if a theme is “widget enabled?” I guess I assumed if the settings page gave me an option that it would work – since they are general widgets like categories, recent posts, etc. (Also, wouldn’t the default be widget enabled?) Sorry for the confusion – and thanks.

    Hi, you’d have to check the functions.php file and the sidebar.php to see if they’ve added some widget code. You could also add this code to enable widgets.

    You’ll find something like this in the sidebar.php file:

    <?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')
|| !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>

    and something like this in functions.php

    <?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar();
?>

    I’ve seen themes that have general widget options, but they don’t show up on the site because the sidebar.php code hasn’t been added.

    Thread Starter football-grrl

    (@football-grrl)

    You are right, the code was not added. Thanks for that.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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