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Creating More Than One Sidebar For Your WordPress Blog

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Step 1:
First of all, you have to locate the sidebar.php file within your website host server. Some themes may have a sidebar1.php file. This can be located under the theme folder itself. In this case, I’m using a sample site and the folder is called, “Jean_Caton_WP_Theme”.
Step 2:
In your FTP application, you can locate this same file, (sidebar.php) either on your hard drive or simply download the file from your site server over to your hard drive somewhere. Next, you can right-click on the sidebar.php file, then request a copy of it. In the same folder, right click again and save it so it should read “sidebar_copy.php”. Right click on this file again, then rename it to read, “sidebar2.php”. Then upload the new sidebar2.php file via FTP to your site server, in the theme folder where you can see that the sidebar.php file is located.
Step 3:
Access your Theme Editor window from your WordPress site dashboard and locate the file on the right hand side of the screen named, “sidebar2.php”. Click on the file so that it comes up in the edit window. Change the second line of code that reads,”
so that instead of “1”, it reads “2”. So now the code should look like this: . Save your changes.
Step 4:
Open up your Theme Functions file (functions.php) and look for the line of code that looks like this:
if (function_exists(‘register_sidebars’)) {
register_sidebars(1, array(
Now change the “1” to a “2” so that it now registers that you will have two sidebars that will now show up in the Widgets window of your WordPress site. Save your changes.
Step 5:
Open up your Page Template file (page.php) and look for the line of php code that recognizes that you have a sidebar in your site pages. It looks like this:
Again, change the “1” to a “2”. Then save your changes.
So now you can access the Widgets window and notice you now have two sidebars that you can add information to. One can be the blog sidebar that can house the Categories, Recent Posts, RSS Feed and other items ONLY pertaining to the blog page. All of your other static pages can have a free report signup web form, your Twitter tweets…the possibilities are endless!
I hope this training tutorial was of value to you. As always, if you have any questions regarding this instruction tutorial and the video that accompanies it, please do not hesitate to contact me at aletha@wordpresstowebsite.com.
Source by Aletha McManama

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