Widgets: Customizing Sidebars and Footers
While menus help people navigate, Widgets add functional content to the structural areas of your website, such as your Sidebars or Footers.
Widgets allow you to easily display things like a "Search Bar", a list of "Recent Blog Posts", or a "Newsletter Signup Form" across your entire site without having to edit individual pages.
Understanding Widget Areas
To manage widgets, navigate to Appearance > Widgets.
Your Theme defines specific Widget Areas (sometimes called sidebars). A typical theme might have:
Main Sidebar: Appears on the right or left side of all blog posts.
Footer Column 1, 2, 3: Appears at the very bottom of the website.
You can drag and drop individual Widgets into these predefined Areas.
Adding and Configuring Widgets
On the Widgets screen, you will see a list of "Available Widgets" on the left, and your "Widget Areas" on the right.
1. Add a Widget
To add functionality to your site, simply click on an Available Widget, hold down your mouse button, and drag it into one of the Widget Areas on the right.
2. Configure the Widget
Once a widget is dropped into an area, it will expand to reveal its settings.
For example, if you drop the Recent Posts widget into your Main Sidebar, you can configure:
Title: e.g., "Latest News"
Number of posts to show: e.g., 5
After adjusting the settings, click Save.
3. Reorder Widgets
You can drag and drop widgets up or down within the same Widget Area to change the order they appear on your website.
Core Widgets Available
PolyCMS comes with several useful widgets right out of the box:
Search: Adds a global search bar so users can find posts or products.
Recent Posts / Recent Products: Displays a dynamic list of your newest content.
Categories: Shows a list of your blog or store categories.
Custom HTML Block: This is the most powerful widget. You can paste custom HTML code here (like a Google Maps iframe, a Mailchimp form embed code, or a banner image).
Pro Tip for Agencies: If you need a widget that doesn't exist, PolyCMS allows developers to easily register custom widgets via the Module system!
PolyCMS is an open-source content management system for modern web applications, inspired by the WordPress plugin and theme ecosystem but built on top of the Laravel framework. It is designed to provide a complete foundation for content publishing, e-commerce, multi-language support, and extensible module architecture — powered by a Vue 3 admin panel with data served entirely through RESTful APIs.
Whether you're building a blog, a documentation site, an online store, or a multi-tenant SaaS platform, PolyCMS aims to give you a comprehensive starting scaffold so you can ship quickly and extend easily through integrated modules and themes. In particular, themes in PolyCMS follow a multi-theme architecture — one Main theme and an unlimited number of Sub themes can run side by side on the same installation.
We hope this ready-made foundation proves useful for building your next website, blog, or web app, saving you from having to start completely from scratch.