A guide to Hybrid Hook Widgets

Hybrid Hook Widgets is a plugin that creates new widget areas for the Hybrid theme and attaches them to the theme's action hooks. Basically, it allows you to add widgets pretty much anywhere.

Typically, to add extra stuff to the theme, you must use one of Hybrid's action hooks. This can be quite confusing to some users. This plugin was created mainly for those users without much XHTML and PHP knowledge. It allows them to take advantage of Hybrid's advanced hook system without the need to understand how it works. Of course, even advanced users can take advantage of this, especially when dealing with client work.

How to install the plugin

  1. Uzip the hybrid-hook-widgets.zip folder.
  2. Upload the hybrid-hook-widgets folder to your /wp-content/plugins directory.
  3. In your WordPress dashboard, head over to the Plugins section.
  4. Activate Hybrid Hooks Widgets.

Using the plugin

This plugin is pretty simple to use. Just head over to your Widgets panel while in your WordPress admin. You'll notice several additional widget areas for you to use. When a widget is placed within a particular widget area, it will show on the front end of your site:

Some notes about usage

Because this plugin isn't necessarily supported within the theme or its child themes, there may be some times when things look a little wonky. This is perfectly normal and expected. This is caused by two issues:

  1. No CSS rules are written specifically for this plugin's widget areas.
  2. The child theme has other features that push the widget area out of view.

The biggest thing here is the CSS. More than likely, you'll have to write some custom style rules to make the widget areas appear as you'd like. That's just how it is, but diving into your child theme's style.css file beats the heck out of having to dive into both your style.css and functions.php files.

To read more about the action hooks within the Hybrid theme, please read the hooks reference.

Plugin support

I run a WordPress community called Theme Hybrid, which is where I fully support all of my WordPress projects, including plugins. You can sign up for an account to get plugin support for a small yearly fee ($25 USD at the time of writing).

I know. I know. You might not want to pay for support, but just consider it a donation to the project. To continue making cool, GPL-licensed plugins and having the time to support them, I must pay the bills.

Copyright & license

Series is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL).

This plugin is copyrighted to Justin Tadlock.

2009 © Justin Tadlock