 Hello, in this video, we're going to be taking a look at widgets. Now, widgets are both very simple and very complicated and can vary significantly based upon your theme, or at least the theme will influence what sort of options you have when dealing with widgets. Okay, so what we're going to do here is the first thing is instead of looking at our dashboard, we're going to go ahead and switch over to our live website for this example. And in this case, in this theme, you have a sidebar over here on the right. And in this case, the sidebar contains a search box, a section labeled recent posts, recent comments, archives, categories, and then this meta area which allows people to log in. Okay, so widgets are generally the things that are going to appear in your sidebar. So what I'm going to do here is switch back to the dashboard. I'm going to go ahead and hover over appearance and then select widgets. And what you're going to have here is an available widgets area to the left. And then you're going to have a selection of one or more sidebars or widget areas over here on the left. In this case, I have a main sidebar. I'll close this up here a little bit. I have a first front page widget area and a second front page widget area. What areas of your site you have available will depend on the theme. Some themes will just have a main sidebar. That's it. Some will have left sidebar and right sidebar. Some will have four different sidebars, a top widget area, a footer widget area, all sorts of things. So in this example, we are keeping it kind of simple, but all of these things will apply to whatever theme you're using. Just which areas you can put widgets into will vary from theme to theme. So I'm going to go ahead and open up my main sidebar again. If you remember back in our live website, we had a search and recent posts and recent comments, archives, categories, and meta. This is what controls what is appearing in this main sidebar for this theme. If I wanted to take this archives and I want to put that up to the top, I can drag and drop things within this. So let's go ahead and put archives at the top. And you know what? I'm also going to put categories up at the top there. Now, this changes instantaneous. There's no save button here. So if I go ahead and switch back to my website and I refresh, you will now see that it's categories, archives, then the search box, then recent posts, then recent comments. So dragging and dropping things over here on this screen into a different order will affect the order that they appear on the live website. Now you can also remove things from this. So let's say, you know, these are the defaults. This is what came with it. You know what this recent post things, this widget is going to show links to the most recent posts. Well, if you're on your homepage, the most recent posts are there. So let's say we've decided we don't want that. All I need to do is take it and drag it and drop it over to this area here. And you'll notice right up top here it says deactivate recent posts. So I'm just going to drop that over here. And now you'll look it's no longer here. And if I switch back to my live website and I refresh that, my order is back and my recent post is gone. Now what you can also do is you can drag other things from here over into your sidebar. So there's a whole bunch that are built in. There's a few that can be added with plugins referred to the plugins video for that one. So let's say for example that I want to put the information about my calendar into my sidebar. So I'm going to go ahead and select calendar. And I'm going to drag that over and I'm going to decide where I want to put it. And I'm going to decide I want it right under search. Okay. And what that's going to do is it's going to put calendar here, but notice it also opened it. So in this case, I can call this upcoming events. Okay. And then if I want to, I could specify particular categories in my calendar and I will refer you back to the calendar video for that. But in this case, I'm just going to go ahead and click save. And then I can close that up. And if I switch back over to my website and I refresh, you will now see that we have the calendar widget built in here. And I have things that I've put into my calendar available for people to look at right here on the main sidebar. Okay. Let me switch back again. Now you'll notice each one of these has a drop down. So in this case, for example, if I open up search, I can put a title on this, although just a search box probably will do it. I can go ahead and do archives and archives. I can give this widget a title. It also has some options. What options are available for particular widget are going to vary from widget to widget. So you do need to kind of play around and see what the options are with different ones. Okay. The one particular widget I want to point out to you right now is the text widget. The text widget is a kind of multi purpose. None of the widgets I have do what I want to do. I want to insert just some text into the sidebar. So for example, I'm going to go ahead and take this text widget, and I'm going to place it right up here. And I'm going to title it big news. We have, I can't type today, some big news coming. Watch this space. Okay. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and just save this. One thing I will mention is this automatically add paragraphs. Generally, if you kind of put in a blank line, it will treat each of that information as its own paragraph and put a blank line in between it. If it doesn't, and you want it to look like this, but it ran it all together, try checking this box and resaving that will probably fix the problem. I'm going to go ahead and tighten that back up. I'm going to go ahead and click save. Go ahead and switch back over and refresh my live website. And you will see here is our big news. Now, the other thing that the text widget is good for is sometimes you will maybe want to provide recent things on your Facebook page. And chances are what Facebook will do is it will provide you with some HTML code that it says, copy this code, paste it into your website. This is where a text box will also come in. You could drag that in here. You can have more than one of them. You drag a new one in. You call this, you know, Facebook. And then this larger box here, this is where you would paste the code that you got from Facebook. And that should then do the job. If it doesn't, give me a shout and I will happily help you out. Okay, in this case, I'm just going to go ahead and delete that because I don't really want to keep it. Now, there is also a section down here called inactive widgets. Okay, now, when I got rid of a widget before, I just dragged it over into this area, which turned it off. But let's say, you know, this big news widget. I maybe I typed in a whole paragraph in there. And I want to put it up now. And then in a week, I want to take it down, but I might put it back up again later. Okay, if I deleted it by dragging it over here, then I would have to start it completely over from scratch the next time I wanted to use it. Instead, if I drag it into this inactive widgets here, it takes it out of my sidebar, but it now kind of leaves that text in there. In fact, if I open this up, you'll see there's my text still. And so in a month or so, if I want to turn this widget back on, I just drag it from my inactive widgets back up into my sidebar. And that text will be back. Okay, there are some other videos that will cover some other specific widgets. But that is a basics of widgets and how they work, how you add them, how you remove them, and how you sort them. Just the last thing I want to remember, remind you of is that different themes will have different widget areas. So you may have to, you know, play around with it. If it says something like first widget area, second widget area and third widget area, what you can do is just drag something in, go take a look at your website, say, Oh, that goes there. Okay, take it back out, move it into another widget area and say, Oh, that that's going to be over here. Okay, so you will have to play with widgets just a little bit to kind of get things lined up, depending on your actual theme. As usual, if you have any comments, leave them in the comments below, and I will happily help you out. Thanks for watching.