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Sidebars and widgets

Widget areas in Vara SaaS, where they are, and how to control when the sidebar appears. Screenshot: a single post showing content on the left and the sidebar on the right

Widget areas

Vara SaaS registers one sidebar and four footer widget areas.
The footer you see is not built from widgets. It is rendered by theme template code from the Customizer settings. The footer-1 through footer-4 areas are registered so plugins that expect a footer widget area can place content there, but the visible footer columns come from Customize → Vara SaaS → Footer. Configure the footer there, not under Appearance → Widgets.

Adding widgets to the sidebar

1

Open Appearance → Widgets

2

Find Primary Sidebar

On desktop the widget screen has the sidebar on the right.
3

Drag a widget in

Blocks, Search, Recent Posts, Categories, Archives, Custom HTML, and anything your plugins register.
4

Save

Screenshot: Appearance → Widgets showing the Primary Sidebar area with widgets added

Controlling when the sidebar appears

Three things combine.

1. The site-wide switch

Customize → Vara SaaS → General → Enable sidebar

2. The post layout

Customize → Vara SaaS → Single Post → Single post layout

3. The per-page override

Each page has a Sidebar Settings box in the page editor, below the content and excerpt fields. Screenshot: the Sidebar Settings box in the page editor with Show and Hide options
Pages default to hidden, which is the right default for landing and marketing pages. If you want the sidebar on a specific page, set it to Show in that page’s box.

The sidebar table

What is in the sidebar by default

Nothing. The sidebar is empty until you add widgets.
An empty sidebar still reserves its column on wide screens, which can look like a broken layout. If you are not using widgets, turn Enable sidebar off. Alternatively add a Search widget and a Recent Posts widget — both are genuinely useful beside an article.

Widgets worth considering

Search

Practical on a blog with many posts.

Recent Posts

Good companion to a table of contents.

Categories

Aligns with the category filtering already on the blog hero.

Custom HTML

A newsletter signup, a CTA, or an ad slot.

Registering your own widget area

If you need an extra sidebar in a child theme:
To render it, add a sidebar to a child theme’s page.php, or use a template part. See Template files.

Accessibility

The sidebar renders as an <aside role="complementary"> landmark, which is correct. Widget titles are wrapped in <h2> so they are announced properly rather than being unlabelled decorative text.
Widget titles are headings. Ten widgets means ten more headings on the page, which affects your heading outline. If your articles use h2 sections, widget titles at h2 sit alongside them — which is correct. Avoid promoting them to h1.

Troubleshooting

Work through it in order: is Enable sidebar on? Is the single post layout a sidebar layout? Is the page’s Sidebar Settings set to Show? Are widgets actually in Primary Sidebar?
Change Single post layout between sidebar-right and sidebar-left.
The sidebar area is rendering with no widgets. Either add widgets or turn the switch off.

Single post settings

The layout dropdown that positions the sidebar.

Blog and archives

The layouts that never show a sidebar.