Hey there
Welcome to WordPress 🙂 What theme are you using? What sidebars are listed on the right hand side of your widgets page?
The theme is ‘Nebula’. I can see the following Sidebars on the Widget page:
Page
Blog
Contacts
Single Post
Single Image Page
Archives
Category
Search
Tag
Footer
Any other information I can provide you with that might help?
Hey
Thanks. I mean does your widgets area show anything that says “Footer Sidebar” , “Right Sidebar” etc? You mentioned only being able to place things in the Footer. This usually means that your theme doesn’t have a sidebar anywhere but in the footer.
If your Widget area in backend only shows “footer sidebar” or something similar then this means your theme doesn’t support widgets elsewhere.
What theme are you using?
Yes all the options I listed before, Page, Blog, Contacts etc are all Sidebar options on the right side of the widget page. I can drag widgets over from the left and add them to any of the sidebars.
For example, I selected a few different widgets like ‘calendar’ and ‘text’, adding them to all the different sidebars, but but I’m done and I refresh my website, the only thing that’s been added to the site is a footer sidebar.
Could the other sidebars be disabled or hidden in any way?
OK here is the thing…Those sidebars will only appear on certain pages. Example, If you place a widget in the “blog” sidebar, this will only appear on your blog posts page and nowhere else. Also, if you put a widget in the Contacts sidebar it will only appear on your Contacts page.
“Page” sidebar is only going to appear on an official page and not on your blog etc. Hope this makes sense. I think the confusion is happening because of this misunderstanding of where you should be seeing these widgets.
Ah ok, that explains a lot. Can you help me understand where the “page” sidebar should show up? All I’m really after is a little calendar on the side of the main page. I’ve got the calendar widget attached to the “page” sidebar but I still cant see it anywhere.
Looking around I went into the ‘customize’ option on the theme page and I’ve found something that might be the problem.
I’m viewing a preview of my website, and on the left side I have the following options:
Site Title & Tagline
Colour
Background Image
Navigation
Static Font Page
Widgets: Footer Sidebar
Is this why I can easily add widgets to the footer sidebar but I’m having so much trouble with the “page” sidebar?
The issue is that your “HomePage’ ONLY supports a Footer widget. the “Page” widget sidebar will only appear on “Pages’ that you create (other than the homepage) such as the about page or contact page etc.
What you could do is make one of your pages the homepage by setting the homepage as static instead of your recent blog posts.
Ok I feel like I’m taking one step forward and two steps back:
I understand now that my pages theme or whatever doesn’t allow a sidebar on the ‘Homepage’, and that other pages can support a sidebar.
So what I’ve done is made a new page, called it ‘Home – New’ and published it to my site. I’ve also added the calendar widget to every sidebar option on the widget page, as well as going through several pages (including the new page ‘Home – New’) and selecting all of the sidebar options from the ‘page sidebar’ dropdown on the right side of the edit page, but I still cannot see a calendar anywhere on my site.
In your last post you said the ‘page’ widget sidebar would only appear on certain pages, such as ‘about’ or ‘contacts’. How does WordPress distinguish which pages are ‘home’ pages and which are ‘about’ or ‘contact’ pages?
The Homepage isn’t considered a “page” with certain themes and when you designate a “page” to be your homepage within the reading settings then your theme automatically takes it to be your homepage and thus has the homepage settings of your theme which includes only a footer widget. Sounds like you need a new theme to fit your needs.
Damn, that sucks. My boss is dead-set on the theme we have, but also on a calendar sidebar. I’ll have to try something else.
For now I’ve just got the footer sidebar with a calendar. Is there any way to only have it on specific pages?
Hey Gareth
Yes, there is a way to only have this appear on certain pages in the footer. You will have to use a plugin such as this one:
http://plugintube.com/display-widgets/
You might also find the plugin below useful, as you can use widgets within posts and pages without having a “sidebar” in the location:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/widgetize-pages-light/
Cheers man, that helps a lot.
Ok so I’ve messed around with those widgets you linked me too, but I’m still struggling to get the results I’m after.
I’ve added a link bellow to one of the pages of our site, the news blog. It has the exact calendar my employer wants on our home page.
Link here
Is there any way you think I could make that happen?
