michaelul

Seems to be working! I copied the functions.php file from the sandbox theme and got the best of both worlds: it supports 2 sidebars, so I still have my original and I now have widgets in the second sidebar! Pretty cool, thanks a lot!

If it’s not your theme you could also back up your blog files and simply reinstall WordPress.

I would take the current theme files off the server via FTP and upload another theme, maybe a basic sandbox. If you think you know which file crashed your blog, maybe you can download your current theme files to your computer to back them up and work deductively, trying to find which file screwed it up. I always make local copies in case this happens.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction! I am completely self-taught, and generally once I know what the next step is, I can learn it. I was just in a bit of a dead end there.

You guys are right: my theme does not have its own functions.php. So I am going to swap in a functions.php file from another theme into my theme’s /wp-content area and put the widget code into sidebar.php and see if that works–then I’ll let you know how it turned out.

Thanks again.

I am using WordPress on Bluehost (which of course has PHP support).

I have a functions.php file under my /wp-includes directory. At the very end, I see this:

function wp_maybe_load_widgets() {
if ( !function_exists( ‘dynamic_sidebar’ ) ) {
require_once ABSPATH . WPINC . ‘/widgets.php’;
add_action( ‘_admin_menu’, ‘wp_widgets_add_menu’ );
}
}

function wp_widgets_add_menu() {
global $submenu;
$submenu[‘themes.php’][7] = array( __( ‘Widgets’ ), ‘edit_themes’, ‘widgets.php’ );
ksort($submenu[‘themes.php’], SORT_NUMERIC);
}

Perhaps something here is not right? Forgive me, I am new to PHP! Thanks a bunch for taking the time to help me.