Essex web design

I've been working with Wordpress more recently and come across a few simple tricks and hacks which make the platform more versatile and easy to use and it's non stop impressing me, this got me thinking that  I should share something very simple with you, that will really help improve your Wordpress theme.

Though it's not quite a "trick" nor a "hack", it is still very extremely useful in making your theme's footer more dynamic.

Start by opening you functions.php file and inserting the following code.

View code

Ok, so let's take a look at what we've done here...

Name
We've named our widget the obvious, footer. We can copy and past the above code placing it inside the function again to create a second widget area, something like "Second Footer Widget Area".

Id
Again very obvious, we've given the id the same title as Name.

Description - Keep your description short and to the point, this is what's displayed in the admin panel.

Before_widget
We've left this blank, but it's used to place your widget inside a some html such as <div class="footer-widget">.

After_widget
This would be a closing tag like </div>.

Before_title
As above, this would be to wrap a heading tag or something similar around the title, let's just say <h2>.

After_title
Again, the closing tag would be used here </h2>.

As I've done in the pasted code, if you don't want to wrap your widget or title in any html set to false.

Now all we need to do is place our lat bit of code in our footer.php document to allow widgets to be applied to our footer.

View code

Save your document, log into your admin panel and your set to go!