BranfordMagazine and WyntonMagazine have a very nice “intelligent” sidebar displaying different stuff depending where you are on the site. But in terms of sidebars – or better: widgetized areas – it has much more to provide. Both themes come along with six widgetized areas which can be controlled from the “Appearence > Widgets” menue of your WordPress admin.
Widgets for many purposes
Besides the regular sidebar there are two widgets for the featured-page template and three for the 3-column page template. You can easily customize your sidebar and the additional page templates without digging into the code. Alongside with the new options panel this is a powerful functionality to control the output of your website without touching a single line of code.
The widget areas are:
- Regular Sidebar
- Featured Page Textwidgets
- Featured Page Topright
- 3-Col Page Left
- 3-Col Page Middle
- 3-Col Page Right
Use widgets to play around with the content and add usability to your website. More about using widgets can be found at the official WordPress dokumentation – the legendary WordPress Codex.
The power of WordPress 2.9
Since version 2.9 WordPress allows to add descriptions to the widget boxes. That makes it even more easy to know where the widget area will be displayed.
Tweaking widgets and adding functionality
How you can even use default sidebar functionalities of BranfordMagazine or any other piece of code and functionality in your widgets was described in another tutorial here.
Custom Widgets take you to a higher Level
The PRO Versions of my themes include a whole bunch of eight custom widgets for individual managing of the sidebar without touching the code. Mor about custom widgets can be found in a tutorial in the near future.