Hi Ziabelle, you can add new widget areas in any theme, if you’re comfortable with making some edits in your child theme. Here are some guides to adding new widgetized areas to a theme:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Widgetizing_Themes
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-register-new-widget-areas-to-your-wordpress.html
Hi Kathryn
thanks for your quick answer.
I followed the instructions in the provided links. But doing so, it breaks my site when I work on the functions.php file.
As I created a child theme, I have understood that I need to create another functions.php and not change the parent theme file.
So I created a new functions.php file with this code inside :
<?php
register_sidebar( array (
‘name’ => __( ’header_widget’),
‘id’ => ‘header_widget’,
‘description’ => __( ‘Widget in the header’),
‘before_widget’ => ‘<li id=”%1$s” class=”widget-container %2$s”>’,
‘after_widget’ => “”,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h3 class=”widget-title”>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h3>’,
) );
?>
but when I go back to my administration panel, the page is white, it’s breaking the whole thing.
I’m probably making a very obvious mistake, but I ‘m new with this editing changes.
The reason that happened is that the widget function in Sketch is not “pluggable” – it’s not wrapped in a ! function_exists check – so it can’t just be copied into the child theme’s functions file.
Only “pluggable” functions that are wrapped in a conditional tag to check whether the same function already exists elsewhere can be overriden in the child theme by just re-declaring them.
Because of this, it becomes more complicated to override the widget setup in your child theme. You’ll need to add a new function to remove the default widget setup function in Sketch, and then add a new function called something else to create your new widget setup.
You can learn more about pluggable functions here:
http://code.tutsplus.com/articles/understanding-wordpress-pluggable-functions-and-their-usage–wp-30189
