Widget help! Formatting & Selective Page posting

[km@lasso]

Hello!

I am brand new to WordPress and am fuddling my way through it.
I have created a bunch of widgets labelled ts-text and have them in the page sidebar.
The problem is there seems to be limited formatting allowed, is this because I NEED to create styles.
I particularly want to center images in the sidebar.

More importantly I need the ability to put certain widgets on certain pages. I used to be able to do this by entering the URL for which page I wanted to either show or hide it on. Now for some reason (maybe due to the update or change in permalinks?) I can't chose what pages to show them on other than hiding them from the front page or hiding them globally.

Any help would be appreciated as I am very frustrated and don't know what to do.

Thanks,
Kelly

[Jeffro]

Welcome to the world of WordPress where at first it's tough but it definitely gets easier with time. You'll be pleased to know that there are a handful of plugins that exist that give you the granular control of where and when widgets are displayed. For example, you might have one sidebar in a theme to house widgets but with plugins such as Widget Logic, you can use conditional statements that can allow one widget to show up on the front page while hiding it and showing a different one on the Single page view.

Try http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widget-logic/ but also look at http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags if you're thinking about using it.

for something that is a bit more user friendly with the same ideas in mind, try http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widget-context/

As for centering images, I've always had luck of using the Center HTML tag within the Text Widget but I learned the best way was to have a class within the themes style sheet for centering images and then encasing the text or image within the Text widget with that class.

For example, I have the following within my themes Style sheet

.center, .aligncenter {
    text-align: center;
}

And the following image within the text widget.

<div class="aligncenter"><a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/WordpressTavern"><img src="http://www.wptavern.com/images/subscriptionicons/bluerss.png" alt="Subscribe Via RSS" title="Add WPTavern To Your FeedReader So You Never Miss A Beat"></a>

Hope that helps you out.