How to insert widgets into the dynamic area in the Revolution Theme

The Revolution wordpress theme by Brian Gardner is the basis on which this website is built. A question has been raised as to how one goes about using multiple side bars or dynamic areas to display widgetised content:

Dynamic Area

This is the process that I developed for this site (please note that this works for the self-hosted version of WP only) for utilising the dynamic area to display widget content. In this case I wanted to develop a user only access portal for clients. I used the Ajax widget which can be found here

There are few items you will need

1. Access to your Blog directory structure from an FTP client such as Filezilla
2. Text editing software such as Notepad

Setting up

1. Login to your site
2. Go to Presentation
3. Click on Theme Editor
4. **Important** open a page template you previously created based on the Featured Page (see this post for details) Do not use the standard Featured Page.
5. Scroll to the bottom of your selected page, where you will see:
   <div id=”homepageright”>
   <h3>Recent Posts</h3>
   <ul>
   <?php get_archives(‘postbypost’, 10); ?>
   </ul></div>
6. This means that the right-hand side of the page is using dynamic content which in this case is showing 10 recent posts. It is showing any posts I make in the news area one post after another.
7. In my case I wanted to insert the Ajax widget into this section and make the posts relevant to the page that people were on – weddings in this case. I also for the purposes of this demonstration wanted to insert the Tag Cloud feature
8. So I uploaded Ajax and activated the plugin
9. I then replaced the code so that it looked like:<div id=”homepageright”><p>Tag Cloud</p>
   <?php wp_tag_cloud(); ?><p>Recent Weddings</p><ul>
   <?php $recent = new WP_Query(“cat=11&showposts=5″); while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>
   <li><a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
   <?php endwhile; ?></p>
   </ul><p>If you are a client, would you like to login and then select your name from the list above?</p>
   <?php get_ajaxlogin(); ?>

End Result

1. The first section calls the standard tag cloud feature in WP 2.3.1
2. I then inserted script that would call any posts that had been listed under weddings category (cat=11) and to show only the last 5 (showposts=5) of them.
3. The final section calls for the Ajax login widget

Variables

1. To change what is displayed in the dynamic area you need to know the php code for the item you want to place – Google is a good place to start!
2. This process applies to other pages in the theme that you can make templates of: news, single or featured

If you would like to learn how to add multiple side-bars and featured pages the take a look at this post