Comments on: Weekend QuickTip: Two Sidebar Templates

By: mit

mit — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 11:27:31 +0000

i want 3 columns theme releted to http://www.theraider.net/ this site theme

By: Rick Overman

Rick Overman — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 17:27:29 +0000

The only gotcha with multiple sidebars is that a lot of widgets (including ones in the wordpress install) are NOT multi-widgets — which means there can only be one used once and cannot be added to additional sidebars. Not a problem in the simple example above but if you start having a lot of side bars on different pages then it’s a huge pain.

I am going to release a free theme framework (OnePress Community) in the next week that will fix all the default widgets, add a few new cool ones and allow multiple sidebars and page customization and support phpBB user integration. The site is http://OnePressCommunity.com and should launch second week of November.

By: Dan Philibin

Dan Philibin — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:52:34 +0000

Hmm – I thought when I read the article in the Codex that it mentioned get_sidebar('right'); was the only one that worked. Maybe you can add anything after the hyphen – can anyone confirm that?

By: DVQ

DVQ — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:49:57 +0000

It appears my code was stripped from the comment above.

What I mean is why not just use php include (‘sidebar-2.php’);

By: DVQ

DVQ — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:37:50 +0000

Why wouldn’t you just use .
This way you could name the sidebar whatever you wanted.

By: Dan Philibin

Dan Philibin — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:03:02 +0000

From my understanding, the name is a requirement, so if you wanted to call it something different that’s something WordPress would have to change. Good idea, though.

By: Ryan Imel

Ryan Imel — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 10:56:57 +0000

One tiny suggestion. Maybe call the secondary sidebar something like sidebar-seconday.php, or something similarly generic? If the sidebar, then, is ever switched from one side of the page to the other, this call won’t be confusing.

This might be my desire for semantic XHTML markup bleeding over into my PHP a bit, but I’d like to think the two languages can share some principles.

Nice tip, definitely handy when the situation calls for it.

By: Bramme

Bramme — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 10:47:20 +0000

If you would look up the get_sidebar function, there’s probably a way to hack into accepting all kinds of sidebar files. Quite possible this is doable with a plugin, however ,I’ve never created wordpress plugins.