Do you want to put some shortcode in your sidebar or widget areas and the author of the theme has not allowed that? Let’s overwrite him/her using this great plugin. What about putting a widget on a page or post? That sounds impossible? Not with this other plugin. Check out this video that will walk you through how to use two incredibly cool plugins for Shortcodes.
Tweet your questions to @WebTegrity
Classes for WordPress, SEO & SMM –
http://webtegrity.wpengine.com/web-design-and-seo-classes-in-san-antonio/
Shortcode in a Widget / Sidebar
https://wordpress.org/plugins/shortcode-to-widget/
AMR Shortcode – Puts Widgets in Pages / Posts
https://wordpress.org/plugins/amr-shortcode-any-widget/
Meetup Group –
http://www.meetup.com/SanAntonioWordPress/
Video Transcript
Put Shortcodes in your Sidebars & Widgets in your Pages – WordPress
Hi, y’all.
Welcome to another WordPress Wednesday.
My name is Kori Ashton. Today I’m going to walk you through how to use Shortcodes inside your Widgets and potentially even into your pages or posts. I found two plug-ins that I want to tell you about. They’re pretty spectacular.
Before I get started I have to mention WPengine. They are our awesome hosting company. They also sponsor our school here where we teach WordPress, SEO, and social media marketing classes. Not only just here in San Antonio but we also offer virtual classes. I’ll put the link to that just down here so you can check those classes out.
Also, I want to mention WPelevation. If you’re an entrepreneur in WordPress, you need to check out their program. They’ve got some really great tutorial videos to walk you through getting better at getting clients, how to pitch your products better, and how to, overall, be a better provider of great service using WordPress.
Then there’s also WP101. If you like WordPress video tutorials, you’ve got to get over to their system. They have amazing tutorial videos on how to use WordPress. Not only free options, but they also have well-worth, paid area where you can get in and get even more advanced WordPress tutorial videos. They’re always up to date. That’s the cool thing about them. I jumped on their website today and they’re already ready and up and running with [WordPress Release] 4.2. They’re fast. They’re fantastic. They’re Texas-made. That’s another cool thing I love about them. Way to go you guys. We love all these awesome sponsors and thank them for their support.
Let’s move into it.
Shortcodes. I’m going to shrink myself down here. If we’re looking at shortcodes, a lot of times whenever you’re plugging in a plug-in (let’s say the Rev Slider, which we’ve done a couple of tutorials on recently) you go into the Revolution Slider and it tells you that you need to use this shortcode right here to actually make this slideshow appear somewhere on your website.
Another spot that you can pull that same thing is right here. It gives you a shortcode. That’s what a shortcode looks like. It has a bracket, some nerd code inside of it, and then another bracket to close it off. That particular shortcode can be copied and pasted anywhere on your website and it’s supposed to display whatever it might be whether it’s a photo gallery or an event calendar. Or your social media links. Whatever it possibly could be.
However, sometimes you want to put a shortcode inside of a sidebar and the author [of the plug-in] has not allowed that to happen. Unfortunately, all that would appear is just literally this text and not the actual feature that you want to appear there. I have found a plug-in. And this is how you would install it.
You go to “Installed Plugins” and go to Add new. And we would say “shortcode to widget.” Let me press enter so it actually does a search. This one right here. It’s kind of a newer one. But I’m pretty excited to say it worked perfectly whenever I tested it out. Check this out. We’re going to go ahead and click install now. We’re going to go ahead and activate it.
[click Activate Plug-in]
The way it works now is you’re just going to go into your Widgets area and wherever you actually want to add a shortcode, instead of using what we would normally use, which is maybe a text box, so that we can paste in your shortcode, you would actually use this available Widget called Shortcode To Widget.
Take this box and drag it up to wherever you want it to be. And then paste in whatever shortcode you wanted to use. Let’s go grab a Rev Slider shortcode really quickly and paste it into and let you see what it looks like. Rev Slider here. Come back over here and paste it in. Click Save. This is happening in our sidebar, so let’s go here and click Refresh.
Now we should have a shortcode happening right over here. Our little slideshow happening. Shortcode To Widget. Obviously you can change that [title] so it won’t appear on your website. You’ll be able to have the slideshow or whatever Widget, for that matter, or shortcode, for that matter, sitting in a Widget box. That’s incredible. It’s a really spectacular plug-in that we found.
Another that I’m going to talk to you about is what if I actually wanted one of these Widget boxes to appear on a page or a post — not in my sidebars —but actually in the core body of a page or a post?
What if, on this post, I wanted to have my social media links sitting right here? And inside of my theme (this is a free theme called Sparkling) it has an option to display my social media links. It’s got this Widget here but I can’t access this by default. I can’t take this really cool feature and go put it in a page or a post unless it’s in the side bar. I want it in the body of the page or post. How do I do that?
I found another really cool plug-in. This one’s just really super spectacular. I can imagine endless ways to use it. We’re going to go back and search for “shortcode any widget.” Check out this one, “amr shortcode any widget.” Look how many installs it has. Look how many incredible reviews and the 5 ***** it has. And I’m going to go review it today to brag about it.
I’m going to Install Now it. I’m going to Activate Plugin. Now. This is spectacular. The first thing you have to do in using this is you have to go into your Widgets and decide which one of these Widget areas you actually want to use on the page. Let’s say I do want to use this Social Widget. Check this out.
Because I installed it, over here on the right side of available Widget areas I now have this new box that says Widgets For Shortcodes. ‘m going to take this Sparkling Social Widget and drop it in there. Click Save. What this does is it allows the plugin to pull any of these Widgets that you want to use and place them somewhere on a website. It knows exactly what it wants to do now.
We’re going to drag any of the ones we want to display on the page over to this area. This is so cool. Nerd out with me on this, y’all. This particular Widget is called Sparkling Social Widget. I want to take the name of it — the actual name is Sparkling Social Widget —I want to take that name and go put it on a page somewhere. Actually, I’m going to put it on a post somewhere. I’m going to go to Post.
Let’s go into Widget in a Page and paste in their shortcode. Their shortcode for this particular Widget is [do_widget “Sparkling Social Widget”] And then you just put [or replace the current] name of whatever Widget you want to appear here on this page or post. I’m going to click Preview and see what it looks like.
Look at this. “Follow us” and now here are my social media links. Isn’t that crazy cool? The way that happened — backup for a second —I’m going to let you see this one more time. Click Save Draft so it keeps that page running. I’m going back to my Installed Plugins. It is the “amr shortcode any widget” Basically what it tells you is that you need to use this shortcode now to display it on any page or post.
So the code is [do_widget ” whatever Widget name “] you’re trying to have appear there. Put it in these quote marks. What’s even more incredibly cool about this plugin is that if you want to style it differently, it allows you to put your own CSS class around it.
If you want to not display the title, it allows you to click “Title=False” and not display the title. It gives you totally different options that you can add into that shortcode string to make it even more customized and able to be displayed on a post or a post in a really cool way.
What if you wanted to put all your posts inside of a page? What?!I know. Brain cramp. Think about that for a second. Let’s say you’re talking in a page and you say something along the lines of “Check out all our most recent posts.” Well, how would you call those, dynamically, to display right there on that page? You can do that now using this plugin.
You would simply go to whatever page or post you would display that on. Let’s go to Pages. About Us. And let’s say there’s an area here that says — after our About Us whole spiel — we say something like “Check out our latest posts.” Instead of making this a hot link over to your blog area, you could actually display them right hereby using a shortcode. I’m going to grab it from where I already have it typed out. [do_widget “Recent Posts”] This is actually going to pull from our Widgets For Shortcodes area here.
Remember, we’ve got to take it [Recent Posts] and drag it over. We want Recent Posts to be over here and be available to us. I’m going to drop it in there. It’s going to show “Number of Posts To Show: 5” If I want more than 5, I can put 10 on there. I think right now I only have 3 posts on this whole [test] website.
I’m going to click Save. We’re going to come back over here and click Preview. And we’ll be able to see (oh, I’ve only got two posts) “Check out our latest posts” and dynamically it’s pulled my most recent posts and displayed them right here. How cool is this? I’m really intrigued by this plugin. I’m excited to bring it to WordPress Wednesday.
Let me ask you that if you have any questions regarding your WordPress website would you consider giving us a tweet? (Tweet your questions to @WebTegrity) Put the information in the description box below.
We would love to have your questions sent to us so that we can have more ideas for videos. We’ll make a video tutorial for you for free.
Check us out locally if you’re in the San Antonio area. Come to one of our MeetUp groups: (SanAntonioWordPress) I’d love to see you next week.
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See you later.
Happy WordPress Wednesday. ( Kori Ashton from WebTegrity.com )
Published Wednesday, April 29, 2015. Subtitles provided by Mally LaPete
