How do I get Admin panel to recognize that the sidebar already has widgets?
You don’t, because it doesn’t have any widgets.
When you have no widgets, most themes display a “default” sidebar instead. This is hardcoded into the theme. When you add widgets to the sidebar, then you’re replacing that hardcoded sidebar with the widgets. So if you want to keep the default sidebar that you see, you need to recreate it using widgets.
Fortunately, some newer themes have started leaving out the hardcoded sidebars, making this less confusing all around, in my opinion, and forcing people to use widgets instead of manually editing themes.
Thread Starter
jcimb
(@jcimb)
Thanks so much! What a relief – I thought I had messed up the template files somehow. Thank you!