The power of Drikatruu Jelly…

lies in its flexibility. Jelly is widget ready, but not widget dependent. If you want to use them, fine. If you want to add manually to your sidebar - it is easy. Actually the sidebar on this site has both elements: widgets and manual content. If you want to go ‘all widget’ - you just delete the clearly marked ‘non-widget’ part from the sidebar. If you don’t need widgets, you just ignore them and edit manually. Sometimes that’s easier. To edit the sidebar you need to change the file ’sidepar.php’ in the Drikatruu Jelly folder under themes. Relax! I have commented the sections you need to change. Easy, easy.

Edit online or locally?

You can either edit template files on your computer in a text editor or a web authoring tool like DreamWeaver or FrontPage, and then upload them to their original folder on your host via FTP or you can edit the files directly in WordPress. Go to Presentation/Theme Editor and select sidebar.php. Check at the bottom of the window. If you get the strange message ‘If this file were writable you could edit it’ you need to check your file permissions. If you can fix it - great, if not just use the edit-locally-and-upload method. Editing locally also has the advantage that it is easier to make back-ups. Not a bad idea in general ;-)

Overwrite, copy paste or delete

Display your site in one window and open sidebar.php in a second window. Look at the entry in the sidebar you want to change, then hop back to sidebar.php and look there for the text you want to change. Find and replace. Save. Upload (if you edit locally). Done. Easy. Don’t forget to also replace the links for the text you change. At the end nothing in sidebar.php should point to www.drikatruu.com anymore. You will find sidebar.php surprisingly short. That’s because most of the content comes from widgets.

Widgets in the sidebar

Most of the menu on the right is built with widgets. ‘Built with Jelly’ for example is done with the text widget. ‘Built with Jelly’ is the title bar of the text widget and then I have there a list of links - like you can see it in the screen shot. You could also do your menu in the non-widget section, but using a text widget is convenient: you can move it around easily afterwards and you don’t need to edit sidebar.php - all can be done via the admin panel.

Didn’t I say it was easy? Experiment. It’s all yours. Trial and error is a great way or learning - especially if you have a back-up. If you don’t, much is not lost either. Just download Drikatruu Jelly again - you will not lose your posts.