converting2wp

It looks as if you’ve fixed this. Perhaps by changing the theme?

Since this thread is marked resolved, if you do need more help, please start a new thread. Add a link to this discussion if it helps explain what you’ve tried to do to resolve the problem on your own.

Threads that are still “open” and have a single post are more apt to get the attention of the volunteers who answer the questions.

That’s happened to me — and to many others, I’m sure.

Glad to help!

When say you went to “look at your functions.php file” do you mean from the Admin Panel >Appearance > Editor ? Then the error is complaining about something in the wp-admin section, not the functions.php itself.

Do you get a different error when you go to the WordPress site itself (the front end)? Or does that seem to be working fine.

If you have shell access (or can see this through your FTP client) you might check to make sure the files you uploaded have the same owner and permissions as the files in the original TwentyEleven theme. If they do, you may have to contact Network Solutions for help on the Server Error (unless doing a fresh install sounds attractive).

[I’ll be offline for most of the rest of the week.]

The only thing I know that would affect picking up new PHP files would be caching plugins — and I don’t know if those affect the admin area. But if you have any, turn them off.

If you copied the code above, a widget area “Home right sidebar” should appear above the list of other widget areas (“Main sidebar”, “Showcase Sidebar”, “Footer Area One”, “Footer Area Two”, “Footer Area Three”).

Have you had success putting widgets into one of the other widget areas?

If you change that string ‘Home right sidebar’ to ‘JTL2744 Widget Area’, then the widget will be labeled with the new string — and may be easier to pick out (assuming that the code was copied and modified correctly).

Here’s how I did a simple example using the code in the Codex page http://codex.ww.wp.xz.cn/Widgetizing_Themes

1. Copy the code

<?php
/**
 * Register our sidebars and widgetized areas.
 *
 */
function arphabet_widgets_init() {

	register_sidebar( array(
		'name' => 'Home right sidebar',
		'id' => 'home_right_1',
		'before_widget' => '<div>',
		'after_widget' => '</div>',
		'before_title' => '<h2 class="rounded">',
		'after_title' => '</h2>',
	) );
}
add_action( 'widgets_init', 'arphabet_widgets_init' );
?>

into the file functions.php in the folder of your child theme. If you don’t have functions.php already in the folder with your child theme files, simply create an empty file and put the code above into it.

2. Change the line
'before_widget' => '<div>',
to
'before_widget' => '<div id="arphabet">',
[It doesn’t matter what you call the ID; you just need something to be able to refer to this area later.]

3. Copy the header.php file from the twentyeleven folder to your child folder. Edit it to put the lines from the Codex article.

<?php
if ( dynamic_sidebar('home_right_1') ) :
else :
?>
<?php endif; ?>

just before the line
<?php get_search_form(); ?>

4. Now edit style.css in your child theme to do something reasonable with the div you’re creating with the code above. Since you talked about putting it near the top of the page, I just used the CSS for the search form and modified it slightly:

#branding #arphabet {
position: absolute;
top: 3.8em;
right: 30.6%;
text-align: right;
}

[The “right: 30.6%;” makes this box sit to the left of the search form.]

5. Finally go to your Admin panel > Appearance > Widgets. You should see a widget area over on the right labeled “Home right sidebar”. I dragged a text box widget over to that and added a header and a bit of text, and clicked Save.

Then the text I entered into the widget appeared to the left of the search form in the header.

Summary: So along with functions.php and header.php in your child theme folder, it’s likely you’ll need corresponding changes in style.css, and the code you put into functions.php will need to lay the groundwork for those style.css changes. I’m not the one to help you with fine tuning the CSS. If you do get it “almost” working you may want to open another incident and share a link to your site with a comment about what’s not working to get CSS suggestions. But I hope this at least gets you started with a new widget area at the top of your page.

You may also want to look at
http://ww.wp.xz.cn/support/topic/plugin-batch-categories-import-hierarchy-not-immediately-visible-on-the-categories-page?replies=2

if you’re trying to import nexted categories.

See my answer to your other question where I recommended the use of get_categories.

If you want to fine tune the output of a list of categories, you’ll almost certainly want to use one of the WordPress functions, not the template tag wp_list_categories. [Even if you use “echo=0” the return value of wp_list_categories still contains all the HTML for the list, and it’ll be difficult to put the <tr></tr> tags where you want them to be.]

The idea of most template tags is that they handle generating the HTML that’s good enough for most folks (e.g. formatting it as a list with the correct links). If you want to do something outside their scope, you’ll need to get the “raw” data and then write the code to format the lists to meet your specifications.

So once you have an array of categories, you can put it into a two-column table, or do other things with it.

Does that help?