need double width text widget

[ride2719]

Hello.  I am helping a friend move her blog from wordpress.com to be self-hosted.  In order to have enough flexibility for her new site also to function as her web site, we need to switch from her current theme (Coraline) to something a little more flexible.  We agreed on the StudioPress theme Prose.  I have just started working with it to achieve as close to the same look and feel as Coraline as possible, within reason.  Once done, we'll branch out into creating the web site.

When a content-sidebar-sidebar format is specified with Coraline, you can define what it calls "feature text" which occurs above the two sidebars, having the width of both, and even with the top of the blog post.  It's a nice feature and I'd like to duplicate it.  However, in Coraline, it is not an add-on widget but is built in as a fixed feature of the theme.

Is there a way I can duplicate this functionality in Prose?  Was it a bad decision to choose Prose, which seems to carry with it some restrictions on what or how you customize?  (We chose Prose because we're not sure who will be maintaining the site going forward, and wanted it to be as easy as possible.)

Any help will be greatly appreciated as I am only moderately experienced with WordPress but have not done a lot of extensive WP customization.  I have not done much with PHP; otherwise I'm an experienced IT person who can follow directions.

Rick.

[wendycholbi]

Hi Rick,

I believe you can achieve the effect you're looking for by adding your text to one of the Genesis hooks. The easiest way to do this is with the Genesis Simple Hooks plugin. After you install the plugin, you'll see a new menu item called Simple Hooks in your WordPress dashboard when you hover over the Genesis menu item.

Looking at the Genesis Visual Hook Guide and the Genesis Hook Reference, I'd say you want to use the genesis_before_sidebar_widget_area hook. Find that hook in Genesis --> Simple Hooks, and add the text (actually HTML) you want to appear above the sidebar(s), and save changes. You may need to experiment with HTML and CSS to get the look you want (I don't think you'll need to use PHP if you just want the equivalent of a text widget).

Another StudioPress forum member asked a similar question here (she wanted to create three sidebars, so she needed a third widgetized area -- you could add a widgetized area to the hook if you ever want anything more than text in your above-the-sidebars area).

I hope this helps!

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I love WordPress, Genesis, and the Prose child theme (my complete guide to using Prose is here: SiteSetupKit.com). Say hi on Twitter: @wendycholbi

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