Changing the content of your sidebar

Your OM4 website allows you to change to contents of your sidebar. Self-managed sidebar content means you can easily change sidebar content, for example, to promote a new campaign or support a special offer.

Changing The Contents of Your Sidebar

You control what appears in your sidebar by adding, removing or re-ordering Sidebar Widgets.

Go to your Dashboard, and the Design, Widgets to manage them.

To change the order widgets in your sidebar, click and drag them to a new location.

To remove widgets, drag them from your sidebar back into the Available Widgets section.

To add new widgets, drag them from Available Widgets into your sidebar.

Some sidebar widgets belong with plugins, and are only available when the plugin is activated. For example, to see the Testimonials widget in the Available Widgets, you first have to make sure the WP-Testimonials plugin is activated. You do this using your Dashboard, Plugins option.

Using standard Sidebar Widgets

Wordpress comes with a number of standard widgets you may find useful.

The Recent Posts widget displays a set of links to your recent posts.

The widget configuration options (if a widget has these, it will show small icon to the right of the widget name) allows you to set a title and control how many posts are displayed (say 5 or 8).

The Recent Comments widget goes well with Recent Posts, and displays the most recent comments on your site.

The Categories widget displays a link to the Categories used by your blog posts.

Using plugin specific widgets

A number of plugins add widgets to your Available Widgets bar. A selection of third party plugins, as well as custom OM4 plugins, that contribute to your online marketing activities have been pre-installed on your OM4 site.

If you have joined the MyBlogLog community, the MyBlogLog widget lets you display information about who has visited your site, and helps them join your MyBlogLog community. Use the widget configuration options to enter the code snippet you get from them.

The Testimonials widget displays a randomly selected client testimonial from your testimonial database.

Here is a more detailed article about using the Testimonials plugins.

The Polls widget lets you setup polls for your readers to participate in.

Using Text Widgets

Text Widgets let you include images, text, links and forms in your sidebar, and using them is covered in a more advanced article.