TwentySeventeen has been a hugely successful and adopted theme for WordPress blogs and sites. And that certainly has to do with it’s customiser options, including the ability to set static homepage areas. In doing so, you can unwittingly remove some very useful features from your users. For example on my personal blog I have set a static homepage up, that has the “2 column” width, with recent blog posts being listed underneath. Whilst I really like this layout, it does means that I have lost the standard sidebar, and along with it some useful widgets, such as a search option. In the video below I demonstrate how I can re-add these features in, using Widgets on Pages. I also show how I can use the new “Auto Insert” feature of the Pro version to include certain widgets at the end of each blog post. Video Transcript In this video we’re going to enhance our 2017 themed WordPress blog, with a few widgets and plugins… with a secondary aim of not having to touch any code. This will give our site extra functionality, useful to the user, but also provides hooks to try and increase the time the user spends on our site. I’ll be using my own site toddhalfpenny.com as a demo, and you can see a quick demo here. I have used the customizer to set a static front page, and then also used the next content part to list my recent blog posts. Since I have done this I’ve lost my sidebar, but I want to include some functionality that sidebars give me, namely widgets. Functionality I’d like includes “search“ and maybe a link to a featured / stick post. Another feature I’d like to add is some hooks at the end of each blog post to try to engage with the user, in my case I’m wanting to add “featured / sticky posts” links. For me to achieve what I want, without having to code anything, I’m going to add a couple of plugins to my site. Firstly a “posts-in-sidebar” which will enable us to create widgets for our sticky posts. This is a 5 star plugin with a 10 active installs… though it does not...
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