Removing all the junk

Your theme probably has default sidebar things like Categories installed. These aren’t necessarily widgets and often theme designers set them to show even if you have no widgets.

To get rid of them (and the WordPress Theme tagline) you’ll need to directly edit your theme templates. The two template files you’re looking for are header.php (for the theme tagline) and sidebar.php.

Within header.php, you’re looking for

<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>

Delete this, and you’ll have no more tagline.

Sidebar.php is a little more tricky. If you delete the wrong thing here, you could really mess up your theme, so be careful. Basically, you’re looking to delete everything between <ul> and </ul> tags.

If you’re unsure, come back and tell me what you’ve found and we’ll see if we can’t get rid of it.

Okie doke, this theme comes with a custom options menu. Go to ‘Appearance’ -> ‘Atahualpa Theme Options’ then look for the blue ‘Sidebars & Widgets’ box.

Uncheck all the boxes under ‘LEFT sidebar: Display on:’, scroll down and uncheck all the boxes under ‘RIGHT sidebar: Display on:’, scroll down and set the ‘Left Sidebar Width’, ‘Left Inner Sidebar Width’, ‘Right Sidebar Width’ and ‘Right Inner Sidebar Width’ to 0, then scroll to the bottom and hit save changes.

That should do it (least it did on mine).

Heh. Got there before me.

Okie doke. Go to plugins, select ‘Add New’ then search for ‘Customize Meta Widget’. Should be the first result. Install it and activate it.

Then, go to the ‘editor’ option under ‘Plugins’ and, from the drop down list on the top right hand side, Next to ‘Select Plugin to Edit’ choose ‘Customize Meta Widget’.

In the main editor window, look for:

#WIDGET BEGINS HERE. PLEASE EDIT AS MUCH AS YOU WANT

Remove EVERYTHING under there and replace it with this:

?>

<ul>
<li><?php wp_loginout(); ?></li>
</ul>
		<?php
#WIDGET ENDS HERE.
echo $after_widget; 

}
?>

Bingo. Only your login option will show.

Edit: You can just copy and paste the code above.

To change the logo space height, play around with the Atahualpa Options -> Style and edit Header area. You can set the height of the logo space in there.

Using the plugin described above will get rid of your unwanted Meta links.