WordPress.org

1. phejster
   Member
   Posted 3 years ago #

   I'm not sure that's the most descriptive title, but hopefully someone will be able to give some thought to this problem. I'm building a site, using WP as a CMS, for a less-than-technical client and I'm trying to streamline the administration as much as possible.

   She wants to have a different sidebar for each section of the site which is easily accomplished by editing functions.php and adding the additional sidebars. In the past I have created 5 different templates (one for each section) that pull in the required sidebar. The only problem with this is that my client would need to specify a template for each page she creates and while I can train her on how to do it, I was wondering if there was a more... elegant solution.

   Is there a way to pull the ID of the page and test to see what the parent of that page is so that I can then load the sidebar corresponding to the parent's ID? For example, if the About page's ID is 12 and I'm on /about/history, the template would display "sidebar-12"

   I'm grateful for any advice or suggestions you may have!

2. phejster
   Member
   Posted 3 years ago #

   I had a thought last night while falling asleep. You could use JQuery to look at the URL and then load a file based on the second-level folder in that URL.

   I might try that but I was wondering if there was a PHP or WP functions method of achieving the same thing - I hate adding additional includes if I can avoid it.

   Thoughts?

3. buddha trance
   Member
   Posted 3 years ago #

   Try this to create conditional sidebars

   in sidebar.php

   if is home, include templatepath, etc.
   if is page (about), include templatepath, etc.
   and so on

   http://www.techzilo.com/blogging/conditional-tags-dynamic-wordpress-sidebars/

4. mkalis
   Member
   Posted 3 years ago #

   Hi, I did similar sidebars in my last template, and used something like this in my functions.php:

   if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') ) {
   	$args = array(
   			'post_type'=>'page',
   			'post_parent'=>0,
   			'order'=>'DESC'
   			)
   	$pages = get_posts($args);
   	foreach ($pages as $page) {
   		register_sidebar(array('name'=>$page->post_title,
   	        'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
   	        'after_widget' => '</div>',
   	        'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
   	        'after_title' => '</h2>',
   		));
   	}
   }
   function find_parent($id) {
   	$this_post = get_post($id);
   	if ( !$parent_id=$this_post->post_parent ) {
   		find_parent($parent_id);
   	} else {
   		return $id;
   	}
   }

   I haven't checked if it works, but apart from some minor mistakes - it should.

   And then just put this in your sidebar.php and it should remove your manual labour afterwards.

   $parent_id = find_parent($post-ID);
   $parent_page = $get_page($parent_id);
   if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar( $parent_page->post_title ) ) echo "";

   Just a note though - if your client deletes / changes the order of top-level pages, the sidebars might jump from one page to another. Adding new pages without deleting the previous should work fine.

Topic Closed

This topic has been closed to new replies.