A WordPress blog can have one or two sidebars, each divided into several parts: search box, list of pages, monthly archives, links to external sites and blogs, etc. The content of each part is generated by a widget. To decide which widgets should be used, go into the Design > Widgets sub-panel. You’ll see on the left side the list of available widgets, and on the right side the list of the widgets actually used. The list on the right will be in the exact same order as the widgets appear on the sidebar.
When you go into the sub-panel for the first time, you’ll be surprised to see that no widgets are used, in spite of your blog having a sidebar. This is because each theme shows some widgets by default, when none are selected. The Kubrick theme that comes pre-installed with WordPress shows by default these widgets, in this order:
- Search: the search box
- Pages: the list of pages
- Archives: the monthly post archive
- Categories: the list of categories used to classify posts and pages
- Links: the list of external links, with one section per link category
- Meta: a fixed list of miscellaneous links
To remove the Categories and Meta widgets — I will reintroduce the former when I start using categories — I simply clicked on the left side of the panel on the Search, Pages, Archive and Links widgets, in that order. This added them to the right side of the panel. If I had wished to change the order the widgets appear on the sidebar, I could simply drag up or down each of the widgets on the right side of the panel. To finish, I clicked ‘Save changes’ on the right-hand side of the panel, below the sidebar widget list.
Note that the Links widget lists all the links marked as visible in the Manage > Links sub-panel. The widget will automatically create in the sidebar one section per link category. Since I was re-arranging the sidebar, I took the opportunity to add links to my other blogs (I know it’s crazy to start three blogs in parallel…) and put them under the new ‘Alter blegos’ (get it?) link category. Thus, the Links widget now lists both the new and the existing wordpress.org links.
One problem emerged when looking at my blog’s new sidebar: the pages were listed in the wrong order. If you remember my earlier post, I had tweaked the page order number so that pages would be listed in the order I wanted. However, the Pages widget lists them in alphabetical order by default. Fortunately this can be changed:
- Go into the Design > Widgets sub-panel.
- On the right-hand side, click on the ‘Edit’ link within the Pages widget. This will show the widget’s options.
- In the ‘Sort by:’ drop-down menu, select ‘Page ID’.
- Click ‘Change’ to hide again the widget’s options.
- Click ‘Save changes’ below the widget list.
Now that the sidebar is done, the next thing is to install some useful plugins, besides Akismet, and to change the theme. I have nothing against the default theme, but I’m not the only one to find it slightly unexciting…