Thanks for your kind words.
Front Page and Home Page are not necessarily the same thing in WordPress terms. Front Page refers, obviously, to the front page, while Home Page refers to the blog page. In a default WordPress install, they are the same, but this can be changed under Settings > Reading.
Checking only “Front Page” in your sidebar settings should be enough to make the sidebar appear only on the front page. If you want it on the home page/blog page instead, you should check “Show with all posts” and set the Exposure: Archives.
Note that if your front page and home page is the same, checking “Show with all posts” will not work, and “Front page” should be checked instead.
Also remember to pick the correct Host Sidebar.
Ok..I set up a News pages to show the blogs and a static page called Home and Home doesn’t appear in the list so I can’t control that page. All the other static pages show but not this one.
The News page and the static Home page was changed under settings > Reading.
I created a sidebar called Home to use with just the static home page. I did one for the Contact page and initially it worked and then it didn’t and I just got Search, Categories & Archives which are the default if nothing is set.
When pages has been set as templates under Settings > Reading, these pages are automatically excluded from the page overview in the sidebar settings. This is by design because these pages no longer are “ordinary” pages but more like dummies. Instead, you should use “Front page” for the front page (Exposure:Singular) or “Show with all pages” for the blog page (Exposure:Archives).
If you choose several different rules for one sidebar, you have to make sure that these rules can be met by a certain combination of content, because the rules depend on each other. E.g. if you check “Show with all posts” and a specific tag, the sidebar will only be displayed with posts with that tag. I know this design has its drawbacks, and at a point I’ll introduce rule groups.
You say that you had a working sidebar for Contact – what did you change before it broke?
I didn’t change anything, it worked one minute then didn’t after that.
I downloaded a theme that had a page post, and home widget area and it was simple to use and I wanted to do the same but my programming skills and knowledge of WordPress isn’t that good to tinker about so thought a plugin would do the job.
However, I’ve managed to extract the bits from the other theme and successfully added it to my theme. I know I said I’m not a programmer but the code looks fairly standard and now I have it working the way I want.
But I’ll have a look again at the plugin to see if I can get it to work with your advice.
Thanks for your help
Colin
It’s great that you got it working, even without the plugin. If you encounter more issues with it, feel free to open a new support thread
Ok thanks for your help and time.
Colin
