Canvas Docs

Widget Areas In Canvas

Canvas is a block theme, so its sidebars are not the classic widget areas older themes used. There is no Appearance > Widgets screen to look for: a sidebar is a template part built from blocks, edited in the Site Editor like any other part of the design, and shown or hidden by settings in Theme Options and on individual pages. Read this page to find where the sidebar content lives and what controls its appearance on each kind of page.

Where The Sidebar Content Lives

Starting screenAppearanceEditor, then PatternsTemplate Parts.

Canvas ships two sidebar template parts, Sidebar and Sidebar Alt. Sidebar is the one blog layouts show by default, and Sidebar Alt is the second column when a layout uses both sidebars. Open one and you will find a stack of block groups, each carrying the widget class: a recent posts list, categories, a tag cloud, search, archives. Edit them as blocks, reorder them, delete what you do not want, and add new groups for anything else, because a sidebar widget in Canvas is nothing more than a block group styled as one.

Keep the group structure when adding your own: a Group block with the widget class in Additional CSS class(es), a level four Heading for the title, then the content blocks. That structure is what the widget styling in Theme Options attaches to, so a bare block dropped between the groups will not pick up the widget background, spacing or title styling.

What Decides Whether A Sidebar Shows

The sidebar's content is one decision, its presence is another, and presence is decided per surface:

  • Blog archives follow Show Sidebar and Sidebar Position in the Archive group of Canvas > Theme Options, the Blog tab. The archive sidebar starts hidden.
  • Single posts follow the equivalent settings in the same tab's Single group, where the sidebar starts shown, and appears on the layouts that carry one.
  • Individual pages and posts can override the site setting through the Blog Layout Override box in the editor's side column, whose Sidebar and Sidebar Position fields default to the global choice. This is how one landing page drops the sidebar while the blog keeps it.
  • Shop pages carry sidebars through their page templates, Shop - Left Sidebar, Shop - Right Sidebar and Shop - Both Sidebars, chosen in the page's Template setting.

Pitfalls

The Widgets screen is missing from Appearance. Expected. A block theme registers no classic widget areas, so WordPress does not show the screen. The sidebar is edited as a template part instead.

Sidebar edits are saved but no sidebar appears. Content and presence are separate. The archive sidebar is off by default, so turn on Show Sidebar in the Blog tab of Theme Options, or on the individual page's Blog Layout Override box.

A block added to the sidebar ignores the widget styling. The Theme Options widget styles attach to groups carrying the widget class. Wrap the block in a Group with that class, matching the groups already in the part.

  • Styling Widgets, the Theme Options tab that styles every widget at once
  • The Blog, the layouts the sidebar appears beside
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