Wordpress Widgets are pretty cool. They take all the guess work out of adding content to your sidebars. But, what if you want to add content manually? There are many situations where someone would want to add content into their sidebar manually. Widget support can only go so far. With Widgets you can add basic HTML code, JavaScript code (Such as Google Adsense code) and quite a few other things. However, there are many things that you can’t add to your sidebar using widgets. And that calls for adding content direct to your sidebar.php file manually.

If you open up your sidebar.php file you will see some lines of code similar to this:

<div class=”sidebar_left”>
<ul>
<li>
<?php include(’adsense_sidebar.php’) ?>
</li>
<?php if ( !function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>
</div>

The code that says this:

<?php if ( !function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>

is the code that displays your sidebar widgets found here:

 If you want to add content above or below the content that gets displayed within your widgets, then simply add your content above or below this line of code:

<?php if ( !function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>

We can use my current sidebar.php as an example. On my site I like to display the names of my Top Contributors. Basically people who leave the most comments rank higher on the list. First thing I had to do was download and install the Wordpress plugin. After I installed the plugin I had to active it. Once it was activated, I needed to insert the php code into my sidebar.php file. This could not be done with the Wordpress sidebar widgets. It has to be done manually. Here is how I did it:

<li><h2>Top Contributors</h2>
<ul><?php ns_show_top_commentators(5); ?></ul>
</li>

If you look at the original code on the sidebar.php file, you will see the the sidebar begins with the <ul> code. 

Adding the:

<li><h2>Title of Your Menu</h2>
<ul>Something Goes Here</ul>
</li>

will create a properly formatted list of your new manually added content on your sidebar.

Here is another example. After display the Top Contributors on my site, I then wanted to display the most popular articles on the site. Again, a plugin needed to be installed and then code needed to be added to my sidebar:

<li><h2>Most Popular Articles</h2>
<ul><?php akpc_most_popular($limit = 5); ?></ul>
</li>

Ok, Great! So lets look at the bigger picture. Lets display all three together:

<div class=”sidebar_left”>
<ul>
<li><h2>Top Contributors</h2>
<ul><?php ns_show_top_commentators(5); ?></ul>
</li>

<li><h2>Most Popular Articles</h2>
<ul><?php akpc_most_popular($limit = 5); ?></ul>
</li>
<li>
<?php include(’adsense_sidebar.php’) ?>
</li>

<?php if ( !function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : ?>

<?php endif; ?>
</ul>
</div>

What about making up my own stuff? What if I want to make my own list? Perhaps it would be a neat idea to display a list of posts that I feel are important!

No problem… check this out:

<li><h2>Author’s Top Five</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href=”yourblog.com/yourposturl.html/” title=”Your Post Title #1″>Your Post Title #1</a></li>
<li><a href=”yourblog.com/yourposturl.html/” title=”Your Post Title #2″>Your Post Title #2</a></li>
<li><a href=”yourblog.com/yourposturl.html/” title=”Your Post Title #3″>Your Post Title #3</a></li>
<li><a href=”yourblog.com/yourposturl.html/” title=”Your Post Title #4″>Your Post Title #4</a></li>
<li><a href=”yourblog.com/yourposturl.html/” title=”Your Post Title #5″>Your Post Title #5</a></li>
</ul>
</li>

Just remember that your sidebar displays a very simple form of HTML that has been used for many years since the early HTML days in the early 90’s. It’s called the Un-Ordered List. And it is way easy to use. The most common problem people face it that they get overwhelmed with the countless lines of code. 

I hope that this helps you when you try to add some content to your sidebar manaully. If you should have comments, questions or suggestions, please feel free to drop me a comment below.