If your theme doesn’t have one, simply create a file in a text editor (we like Notepad++ in the Windows environment and TextMate in the Apple environment). 99% of all WordPress templates/themes have a functions.php file. Step 1: Registering the Additional Sidebar Within the WordPress Templateįirst step: we start by registering our sidebar within the template’s functions.php file. With the same technique, we could create additional sidebar areas, the steps would be the same. That’s it! With these three steps, we’ll have a 2nd sidebar that will display on our custom homepage. We are going to include a reference to our custom sidebar-homepage.php file in our custom page template.We are going to create a separate, custom sidebar file called sidebar-homepage.php.We are going to register our sidebar within the template by making an entry in the template’s functions.php file.Let’s first take a 10,000 foot view, we are going to employ the following steps to add our sidebar: The screenshot below shows the default “Sidebar 1” sidebar from our simple template, and we’ll add a second sidebar called “Homepage Sidebar”. We have a custom homepage in our template where we want to include a robust call to action to our website visitors rather than a Category list which is more appropriate for blog readers. So what we’ll do in this tutorial is to add a second sidebar to one of our custom template pages in our WordPress theme. Laying the Groundwork for Your New Sidebar

This is the approach we’ll teach you in this tutorial. This technique is especially powerful when combined with custom WordPress page templates–with additional sidebars, we can have custom sidebars for each of our custom page templates. Additional sidebars let you place any WordPress Widget (such as Recent Posts, Pages, Links/Blogroll, Calendar, Tag Cloud, as well as any custom widgets) into new areas of your WordPress template. And, you aren’t restricted to using your sidebar in the typical sidebar area–you can put your new sidebar in a header, a footer, or any other area in your template. But, in keeping with WordPress’ open architecture, you can easily add a second (or 3rd or 4th) sidebar to your site’s theme. Most simple WordPress templates/themes generally employ a single sidebar.

Add slideshow to wordpress theme 2017