One more Saturday to talk about the most basic things in the WordPress world. Something as simple as menus and widgets, which is sometimes not so simple.
The main confusion is that there are actually four concepts and not two that we have to take into account, and some of them have several names, to further complicate the issue.
WordPress menus
The menus are what we see if we go to “Appearance > Menus”, in the drop-down of the “Edit menus” tab that we see by default. Are us those of us who create them, and we can make as many as we want, without limits.
Another very different thing are the places, that is, the locations where those created menus are shown. That no longer depends on us, but on the creator of the theme (theme, template). He and only he decides how many places there are and where they are shown. Let’s see for example the places of the Twenty Fifteen theme:
As you can see, it has two menu locations. One called “Main Menu” and the other “Social Links Menu”. I repeat: Those are not menus per se, but locations, places where the assigned dropdown menus will be displayed. For example:
This particular theme has two places (which will be located somewhere in the theme) but each theme has its own. They can be two, they can be fifteen, or they can be zero, since it is not compulsory for a theme to have places to place menus.
WordPress Widgets
In the same way as the menus have placesthe widget they have widget areas. Important: Sometimes the “widget area” is called the “sidebar” or “sidebar”. This is so because originally there was only one sidebar, that is, a bar, which was on the side. But over time this changed, and although it is still called a “sidebar” it may not be a bar, nor a sidebar. But eIt’s exactly the same. They are different names to define the same thing: A place where we put widgets. Let’s see the case of the Genesis theme, which comes with 6 widget areas:
As we can see, there are 6 places to place our widgets, in the same way that before we had 2 places to place our menus. But the difference here is that in the same place (widget area) we can place as many widgets as we want:
I hope I was able to make the difference between menus, locations, places, widgets, widget areas, sidebars and sidebars clear. And if I’ve just messed you up more, here’s a schematic that summarizes the most intuitive thing I’ve been able to do:
I hope that now it is clear and all doubts have been cleared up. And tomorrow we will see what happens with all this when we change the theme… 😉 You already know that if you want to know more and better about WordPress, you can subscribe to me, in which I talk about this and much more. You already know that if you do, you will be able to access .
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