Catalyst Theme Widget Areas

This week’s Feature of the Week covers some old ground a little, but I feel it’s worth doing so to ensure greater awareness of a really great feature in the Catalyst Theme – EZ Widget areas.

Catalyst Theme is a fully widgetized theme.

For those new to, or unfamiliar with WordPress Widgets, a Widget is an item such as a text box (containing specific text and/or images or whatever), or a linked list of recent posts, pages, categories or tags etc, advert blocks etc etc…. all sorts of things…

Using the Widgets option in the WordPress Appearance menu, Widgets can be dragged into Widget Areas such as the Sidebars.

WordPress Widgets and Sidebar Widget Areas

With Catalyst Theme, you can choose to have Widgets in Sidebars (including different Widgets on different pages as shown in Feature of the Week Post 15), and you can also create Custom Widget Areas that appear where you specify.

But Catalyst also provides a great option called EZ Widget Areas which provide a powerful and flexible way to create ‘standard’ Widget Areas for displaying Widget based content.

There are three sets of EZ Widget Areas, the Feature Top Area, the Fat Footer Area and an option for Static Homepage content.

The location, structure layout and design styling options for each EZ Widget Area are determined using the EZ tab of the Dynamik child theme options.

Here’s a brief overview of each area.

Feature Top EZ Widgets

The Feature Top EZ Widget Areas are displayed above the Content and Sidebar areas for the selected locations on your site.

The locations for which this Widget Area can be displayed include:

• The Home Page
• Posts
• Pages
• Archive Pages
• Blog Templates
• Blank Templates

The Feature Top EZ Widget area can be selected for any or all of these locations.

The layout structure for this EZ area allows for 1, 2, 3, or 4 Widget Areas to be included, with options for a wider left, wider right area or equal width options for the 2 Widget area.

In the example below, a three Widget area option has been selected from the drop down list of options and has been set to appear on the Homepage only.

Feature Top EZ Widget Area

These three Widget Areas will now appear in the WordPress Appearance Widgets menu option underneath the Sidebars Widget Areas.

In the same way as for the Sidebar Widget Areas, any available Widgets can now be dragged and dropped into the Feature Top Widget Areas and customised as usual.

EZ Widgets – Feature Top Widget Areas

These Widget Areas will now appear at the top of the Homepage content as shown here:

EZ Feature Top Widget Area with 3 Widget Area Layout

Fat Footer EZ Widgets

The same location and layout structures are available for the Fat Footer EZ Widget Areas.

As the name implies, these appear in the Footer area of the selected locations on the site (Homepage, posts, pages, etc etc)… with an option to include them just above, or within the footer area itself.

EZ Fat Footer Widget Area with 3 Widget Area Layout

An example of this is shown in Feature of the Week 8 – Widget Areas Made easy with Catalyst Theme which shows an EZ Fat Footer Area containing 3 Widgets in the Footer itself.

The flexibility of Catalyst Theme means that Feature Top and Fat-Footer areas can be combined where required and kept separate elsewhere. For example, the Feature Top Widget area could be selected for Pages, while the Fat Footer area only displays on Posts etc etc.

Static Homepage EZ Widgets

The final set of EZ-Widget areas can be used where a widgetized Static Homepage is required.

Once again this option can be used in conjunction with either, or both, the Feature Top and Fat Footer EZ Widget Areas if required.

Here’s another example where a 1_3_2 format Widget layout has been selected for the Static Homepage EZ-Widget Areas.

Static Homepage EZ-Widget Areas

I hope this post reinforces the concept of how flexible and easy the EZ-Widget functionality makes it to design the layout for content areas using Catalyst Theme.

Have fun.

David.

David Pritchard is the author of the Catalyst Theme Cheat Sheet – a 200+ page guide to help users make the most of Catalyst Theme. It has been made freely available to licenced Catalyst users in the downloads section of the Catalyst Theme forum. David also has a site that covers WordPress, SEO, internet marketing techniques and other topics not directly related to Catalyst Theme itself at http://www.FastStepInternetMarketing.com