First, you need to click on “Appearance,” and click on “Widgets.” And in this section, you can select which sidebar you want to edit. Some themes may have more than one sidebar. But the default theme has only one sidebar, so you can select the sidebar that you want to edit here, and these are all the widgets that you can add to the sidebar. So you can have a look at all these widgets. I’m going to add the Recent Comments widget. And then I’m going to add Tag Cloud, and Recent Postsalright. So I’ve added three widgets to my sidebar, and you’ll notice that each of the widgets can be moved to edit the order that the widgets appear on your sidebar. For example, if I want Tag Cloud to appear at the bottom section of my sidebar, I can just move it right to the bottom. And you’ll also notice that most of the widgets can be edited by clicking on the “Edit” link, so I can give this Recent Posts widget a title, and I can also select the amount of posts that I want to show. So if I want to show 10 posts, I’d edit to 10, and click on “Done.” And I can also edit the Recent Comments. So for example, if I want to show eight of the most recent comments, I click on “Done” again, and then when I’m done making the changes, I just click on “Save Changes.” Alright.
And you can see that now, my Recent Posts and my Tag Cloud widget have already been used up, so I cannot edit anymore to any other sidebar, but there are other widgets here that you can have a look at; for example, a Text widget, which is really very useful if you want to add in banners or any type of HTML or even AdSense ads onto your sidebar. You can just use the Text widget.
And you can see, the Text widget is prettyvery flexible, and give it a title, and you can enter anything you want, as long as it’s valid HTML in this section, and click on “Done”.
If you want to remove a widget, just click on the Edit link and click on “Remove,” and the widget has been removed. And then you click on “Save Changes” to save your new widget order. So that’s it.
Now, let’s look at our theme and see how these widgets appear on the sidebar. And you can see here, this is how the default WordPress blog will look like if you have not installed any other WordPress theme. And you can see in the sidebar section, now I have Recent Polls that shows right on top, and Recent Comments. So that’s how you use WordPress widgets.
