Get all themes with lifetime updates for 95 USD. View all promotions

An introduction to your sidebar positions

As with most themes, you get sidebars to publish widgets to. This theme offers up to 11 sidebar positions. 

bw sidebars

bw sidebars2

Left and Right Sidebars

One of the things you may discover about my themes is that I include a blog left and right sidebar column while also adding a page left and right sidebar column. I do this for a reason that lets you separate sidebar column widgets from the blog or from the page. You may want your pages to not show blog based widgets, so to help manage widgets better, I create two sets:

  1. Blog Left Sidebar
  2. Blog Right Sidebar
  3. Page Left Sidebar
  4. Page Right Sidebar

This means that if you publish a widget to the Blog Right Sidebar, this will not show on the Page Right Sidebar…and vice versa. If you want the same widget to show on both, you will need to publish a new one to the Page Right Sidebar.

Breadcrumbs Sidebar

The breadcrumbs sidebar is provided for breadcrumb plugins that offer a shortcode or a widget that you can use to drop into a sidebar position. This theme gives you that position which is available just above the main content container for your blog posts (full post view) and pages.

Dynamic Width Sidebars

Common with my themes, you get groups of sidebars that are dynamic in width. This means they self-adjust whenever you have widgets published to the following sidebar positions:

  • Bottom 1, Bottom 2, Bottom 3, and Bottom 4

For example, this is what happens when you publish widgets to the Bottom 1, Bottom 2, Bottom 3, and/or Bottom 4 sidebar position(s) as outlined below:

  • Publish 1 widget = 100% width
  • Publish 2 widgets = 50% width each
  • Publish 3 widgets = 33% width each
  • Publish 4 widgets = 25% width each

The above example and capability only works for sidebar groups which contain 4 sidebar positions that relate to each other. You will know when you have this because when you are logged into your dashboard and go to Widgets, you will see them like this example:

Show Widgets on Select Pages Only

Having the same widget show up on every single page of your website is not only frustrating, it just looks bad and takes the flexibility of using sidebars to create amazing layouts. The only solution right now is to use a plugin because WordPress does not have this capability….with WordPress, the plugin will show up on every page that has the sidebar you published it to.

In the past I normally would recommend a specific plugin that I used all the time…including over 200,000 other people because it was a very popular and efficient plugin. Unfortunately, it came under new ownership at some point in time. Without going into details, there was malicious intent with the plugin, which is a shame because with the original developer, the plugin was phenominal. WordPress.org has since removed the plugin from the plugin directory…..now the hard part is to find a quality alternative.

Options

This is just a small list of several possible alternatives to the above mentioned plugin, but the closest ones that I can find so far are listed below and are based on the Widget Visibility in Jetpack. 

  1. If you use Jetpack, turn on the Widget Visibility module and use that. However, if you just need the one module, Jetpack is overkill, so check out
  2. JP Widget Visibility – This one is being used on the live demo site for this theme.
  3. or Widget Visibility Without Jetpack

There are other possibilities, so I recommend checking out the wordpress.org website for plugins with a search of “show widgets“.