How To Customize A Specific WordPress Widget
Many themes, including StudioPress Themes, tend to use the same CSS styling definition(s) for all of the widgets in a section, like the sidebar. We are often asked the question, “How Do I Customize A Specific Widget?
If you are asking, “why?” Think of the design possibilities of having different widgets having unique backgrounds, different colored text, or a specific height. The possibilities are numerous.
The first thing that you need to do is find the name of the widget that you want to give individual styling to. You can do this by going to your blog and left right-clicking on the screen, then clicking on the View Page Source or View Source {depending on what browser you use}. This will open another window or a notepad that will display the pages’ html.
When WordPress generates the html from the widget code, it gives each widget an ID name and Class name, along with a generic widget class. This is the format:
<li id=”widget-id” class=”widget widget-specific-style”>
Here is what the html may look like, depending on what widgets you are using:
<div id=”sidebar“>
<ul id=”sidebarwidgeted“>
<li id=”text-270086951“ class=”widget widget_text“>
</li>
<li id=”execphp-363872761“ class=”widget widget_execphp“>
</li>
</ul>
In StudioPress Themes, widgets are typically styled in the CSS using a generic definition based on the class {which is “widget”}, that affects all of them. This class is defined using one of these definitions:
#sidebar .widget
#homepage .widget
From the html code source above, we can see that the ID name of the first widget is “text-270086951″ from [id=”text-270086951“], which is what we need to customize that specific wordpress widget and the class name is “widget” from [class=”widget widget_execphp“] .
All we need to do now is add a new CSS definition to style the selected widget. In this case, let’s say that we want to add a specific font color and bold the text, plus give the widget a specific height (maybe you are using a flash component that needs this).
In order to affect our selected widget, we use the name that we found above, in the CSS definition:
#sidebar #text-270086951 {
color: #EF000A;
font-weight: bold;
height:100px;
}
Since we only provided settings for three things, the rest of the styling will come from the generic definition through inheritance. That definition, in this example, looks like this:
#sidebar .widget {
background: #FFFFFF url(images/sidebartop.gif) top no-repeat;
float: left;
width: 300px;
margin: 0px 0px 10px 0px;
padding: 9px;
border: 1px solid #DDDDDD;
}
So, if you want to customize a specific widget, then add the additional or overriding setting(s) to the specific definition {#sidebar #text-270086951} . This will override the generic definition.
To clarify this, if your generic definition has a setting for a background color and image, but you want your selected widget to have it’s own unique background color and no image, so that it is different from the other widgets, add the setting to the specific widget definition. Example:
#sidebar #text-270086951 {
background: #9F9F9F none;
color: #EF000A;
font-weight: bold;
height:100px;
}
The background setting in our specific widget definition above will override the defined background setting in the generic widget definition.
There are other ways to customize your WordPress widgets using CSS, like styling specific generic widget classes. This would affect all widgets with the same class name and could be used to give each class a different look through unique styling. But that is all for another time and article.
Now you have the basics and through well thought-out design and a little experimentation on your part, you can create a truly unique sidebar by customizing specific WordPress widgets used in your sidebar.
Note: This tutorial is based on the popular StudioPress/Revolution Themes and while most StudioPress Wordpress themes use the same division names in their code, not all do. Also, if you are using this for a non-StudioPress Theme (tsk, tsk) your Division ID & Class names will be different from the code used in this tutorial.
Related posts: