Just finished a fun little project for Girl Guiding New Zealand. View the live site here.

With the 2011 Rugby World Cup approaching fast, one of our clients – Caritas decided to compare the various countries participating  on a different scale than sporting ability – social equality… interesting results.

Great artwork supplied and an open brief for the design, I’m pretty happy with the end result.

You can view it here.

The problem I came up against is many themes I have picked apart and analysed came with only one widget area. In reality you often need two or more widget enabled areas. Here for my future reference and yours is some code snippets that will easily allow you to have as many widget areas as you want or need.

The first file we want to look at is functions.php We want to register these widget enabled areas so they appear in the WordPress administration area. All we need to do is add the following code to our functions.php file

if ( function_exists(‘register_sidebar’) ) {
register_sidebar(array(‘name’=>’widget area’,
‘before_widget’ => ‘<li id=”%1$s”>’,
‘after_widget’ => ‘</li>’,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h2>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h2>’,
));
}

Where we have: register_sidebar(array(‘name’=>’widget area’,
‘widget area’ is the name of our new widget. It could be ‘footer widget area’, it could be ‘banner adverts’ whatever is appropriate.

You will see some html there as well to wrap our widget in, pretty straight forward.

Step two is as simple as opening up the template that you want this new widget area to appear on, locating the div you would  like it to appear and then pasting this code:

<?php if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(‘widget area’) ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Again nice and straight forward, just replace ‘widget area’ with the name of the widget area you created. Log into your WordPress dashboard and navigate to the widget area and customise away. After that it is just a case of rinse and repeat, add as many individually named widget areas as you like.

Among the various things I have listened to while making this site.

This was a great project with a great client. A custom wordpress theme with all the bells and whistles including the ability to change between Spanish and English versions and a pretty sweet drop down menu. View the site here.

Well im getting there at least with the index page and the overall CSS. Hopefully by the end of the week will have all the basic templates sorted.

Let’s do this thing!