Using text widgets to place text, images, forms and links in your sidebar

Text Widgets are a powerful tool for placing text, images and links in your sidebar.

You can add many text widgets to your sidebars.

Inside each text widget, you can include text. And you can include HTML tags to control what is displayed. You can get by without understanding HTML if you copy and change the examples provided on this page. Read the HTML for Bloggers if you want to learn basic HTML.

OM4 Community sites (OM4 Tourism and OM4Business) have some restrictions on what HTML tags you can paste into a text widget, for security reasons. See the Allowed Tags at the end of this page for the full list. In summary, you can use standard HTML such as anchor tags and images, but you cannot use Javascript, Forms or Input statements. These restrictions do not apply to OM4 Premium sites.

Sample Text Widgets

Here is how to create a new Text Widget and add it to your sidebar.

Go to your Dashboard and Design, Widgets to start.

Adding text widgets to sidebars

To add a text widget to a sidebar, click on the widget in the Available Widgets bar to add it the the Current Widgets in your sidebar. Once in Current Widgets, click and drag each widget to place it above or below existing widgets.

Edit the text in a text widget

In this example, we are going to place a simple text message into the sidebar. Because a text widget allows you to use HTML, you can use exactly the same approach to place text, links or images in your sidebar.

Click on the Edit icon at the top right of the text widget to open its configuration window.

You can use the configuration window to set a heading for the text widget, and also what appears in the widget. Most sidebar widgets follow the convention of displaying an unordered list (otherwise known as a bulleted list). This makes your text widgets look consistent with other, automatically generated widgets.

So for most text widgets, use the format shown above. This is what is going on:

• First open a ul tag
• Then open an li tag, include your text, and close the li tag
• Close the ul tag

When you are finished:

1. click the Change button at the bottom left of the text widget to save and close it.
2. click the Save Changes button to save the overall changes to the sidebar

View your text widget on your site

Once you have edited the text of the text widget and saved it into a sidebar, you can view your site and look at it.

The sky is the limit

Once you understand how Text Widgets work and get better at HTML, you will find it easy to add lots of different content to your sidebar including:

• custom menu widgets - include a set of links to your custom pages, for example, to a set of related articles
• custom banners and buttons - create a button and use it as the anchor for a link
• subscription forms - you can place Aweber or Feedburner subscription forms in a text widget
• combinations of subscription forms, images and links

Here are some examples of OM4 sites using Sidebar Text Widgets for different purposes. You can see how the widget looks, and then the text used to create it.

This widget combines a clickable image and a link to feature a book review.

This widget combines a clickable image link to promote a related event.

This widget uses a clickable image to provide easy access to a map.

This widget combines third party code snippets, clickable images and links.

Allowed HTML Tags

The following HTML tags can be used in text widgets in OM4 Community Sites.

address, a, abbr, acronym, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, cite, class, code, col, del, dd, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, img, ins, kbd, li, p, pre, q, s, span, strike, strong, sub, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, tr, tt, ul, ol, var