Sidebar, Widget, and Blogroll Issue
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I’ve searched in the FAQs and on various support sites, yet I can’t find an answer to what I think is an elementary question.
I want to add various links in different categories on the sidebar, yet keep screwing it up. And I’m not clear on why what I try to list under Blogroll (thinking that’ll be the category on the blog) it says merely Links. I also tried to add different categories to link to other websites, yet they all get dumped into the generic links category, which I thought I could avoid by following what I found on an online tutorial.
I figured I’d explore widgets (which I’m trying to understand) to remedy the problem, but then when I put in a widget, everything that was originally on the side bar disappears!
I imagine this is pretty elementary, and later I won’t believe that I couldn’t figure this out, but right now I’m getting frustrated!
gabachayucateca.wordpress.com
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When you first sign up for a blog and choose a theme, there is a “default” set of widgets displayed. Once you go into presentation > widgets and add a widget, the default set will disappear from the sidebar and you will have to drag the ones you want from the bottom pane into the sidebar pane and when you have the ones you want there, click “save”.
[soapbox mode on]
Sadly all blogroll links, no matter the category you assign will show up in a single list with no indication they are in different categories.
When we were given multiple category widgets, we all though that that would allow us to separate out links by category, but that is not what we got. What we got were multiple widgets that all show exactly the same thing.
Hardly useful.
Staff has never responded to our questions on what they had, or have, in mind in giving us multiple, identical category widgets. One can only assume it is a partially finished future “surprise.”
[soapbox mode off]
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Amazingly, I followed everything you wrote. Thanks for taking the time!
I guess what I want to do is have a couple of things up there…as a friend does, who has various categories such as Commentary, Forums, and Friends (her blogroll) and links corresponding to each. But I’ve no clue how to make that happen! Would that be done with separate widgets?
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I should have included this in the first post. One solution would be to use individual text widgets and then code the links into them via html as shown here in the FAQ: http://faq.wordpress.com/2007/07/01/how-to-write-links/ . It’s a little more work, but it will work for you.
If you look at the blog linked to my username (self-hosted using the software from wordpress.org) you will see that the links widget automatically separates and displays the links based on category, which is what I think wordpress.com should do – either that or make it so that you can use different widgets for different links categories (probably what they have in mind if and when it actually gets finished).
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For bloggers who find this thread in the future please take note of the following:
All wordpress.com blogs have only one Blogroll located in the Admin area where you enter all links and assign each link to one or more Categories.
The links you enter into your Blogroll are displayed only after the Links widget is placed in your sidebar. Also note that there must be at least one link assigned to a Category before it will appear in your sidebar.
Likewise, the Category widget must be placed in the sidebar for posts to display. And just like links when it comes to posts there must be at least one published post in a Category before the Category will be displayed in your sidebar.
Once your Links widget and Categories widget are positioned in your sidebar, the manner in which the links you entered into your Blogroll will be displayed is alphabetically in accord with the Categories you created and assigned to those links when you entered them into your Blogroll.
Therefore as you will have multiple Categories it may look like you have multiple Blogrolls when you view your links in your sidebar. But in truth, you only have only one Blogroll, which is displays links as separate alphabetically ordered groups, in accord with the Categories that you assigned to those links when you entered them into your Blogroll.
* wordpress.com bloggers – Also note that the foregoing does not apply to the Blix theme which is coded to display all links in one alphabetically organized row.
{wave to tsp – it’s the same on our wordpress.org installs}
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