Home Pages and EZ Widget Areas

One of the great features of Catalyst is that it is a fully widgetized theme.

As well as catering for the inclusion of widgets in standard widget areas such as Sidebars etc, almost any other requirement for widgetized content can be included through the use of Catalyst’s Custom Widget Areas and its wonderfully powerful and super flexible EZ Widget Areas.

In this week’s post I’m taking a look at Catalyst’s EZ Widget Areas and in particular the functionality they can provide for use on the homepage of a site.

There are three main blocks of Catalyst EZ Widget Areas available to work with:

• The Static Homepage EZ Widget Areas
• The Feature Top EZ Widget Areas
• The Fat Footer EZ Widget Areas

as well as the Homepage EZ-Widget Area Extras!

The Static Homepage EZ  Widget Areas allow a fully widgetized Static Homepage to be used in place of the Default WordPress Homepage along with the Static Homepage Sidebar option to be found in the Extras section.

The Feature Top and Fat Footer Areas can be used in combination with either the Default WordPress Homepage or an EZ Widget Area based Static Homepage used in its place. These two areas can also be used throughout the rest of the site on Pages, Posts and Archives etc.

The settings for the various EZ Widget Areas are all to be found in their own tab of options in the Dynamik Child Theme Options.

For this week’s post I’m going to concentrate on those areas that can be used on any type of homepage, be it the Default WordPress, or EZ Static, Homepage types.

Feature Top and Fat Footer Bottom EZ Widget Areas

These widget areas each allow upto 4 widget areas to be displayed, as shown in the following examples:

Example Feature Top and/or Fat Footer EZ Widget Layouts

In the case of the Feature Top EZ Widget Areas, these will be displayed as one row of Widget Areas above the main Homepage content, and likewise one row of Widget Areas below the main Homepage content for the Fat Footer EZ Widget Areas.

Both, or either of, the Feature Top and Fat Footer EZ Areas can be switched on independently of each other for the site’s homepage.

Here is an example of a site’s homepage with a feature_top_4 EZ widget area layout displayed above the normal content.

Homepage with EZ Feature Top Widget Areas Added

Both the Feature Top and Fat Footer EZ Widget Areas can be used in conjunction with whatever type of homepage content is specified, which can be any of:

• the default WordPress Homepage – displaying the latest blog posts
• or the default WordPress Homepage – displaying a selected static page
• or a fully widgetized EZ Static Homepage – displaying an EZ Widget Area based layout

If used, the default WordPress Homepage option is set in the WordPress > Settings > Reading options.

Alternatively, the EZ Static Homepage can be selected for use in place of the Default WordPress Homepage in the Dynamik Theme > EZ > Static Homepage settings.

Homepage Slider

The other Widget Area that can be used on any type of homepage in addition to the Feature Top and Fat Footer areas, is the HomePage Slider (to be found in the Homepage EZ Widget Area Extras section).

This allows an image slider area to be incorporated between the Feature Top EZ Widget Area (if activated) and the rest of the homepage content.

If used, there is a choice of whether this area stretches side to side across the site, or is constrained to fit inside the Sidebar (if applicable) as shown here:

Homepage Slider Options

Here we can see the Image Slider Widget Area added to the previous Homepage example:

Homepage with Homepage Slider Widget Area Added

You can find further details of implementing Image Slideshows in this previous Feature of the Week post on the EZ Homepage Slider functionality.

In next week’s post I’ll look at how to implement a fully widgetized front page using the Static Homepage EZ Widget Areas.

In the meantime, have fun!

David.

David Pritchard is the author of the Catalyst Theme Cheat Sheet – the 250+ page guide that helps users make the most of Catalyst Theme. Licenced Catalyst Theme users can get their FREE copy in the downloads section of the Catalyst Theme forum. David also has a site that with guides to using Catalyst Theme, WordPress, SEO, internet marketing techniques and other topics at http://www.FastStepInternetMarketing.com