is_page_template not working when side bar is after query_posts

Hi everybody !!

I’m working on WP 3.0.1, using twenty-ten as a base template to create my own.

First let me explain what I’m trying to do. I created a website (local only for the moment so no url sorry) using static pages. We want “inside” this website a blog to display a list of news (using posts).
I tried the “blog-in-blog” plugin but got issues for multilinguism (using WPML), so I finaly tried this codex help . I ended up creating my own template called blog_template.php, to get all the posts in category 1 and 11 to display on my “blog” page (5 per page). The template works fine, the problem is with the sidebar.
For this website, I created 2 sidebars. The first one (that contains a plugin to display a list of child pages) should only display on “normal” pages. The second sidebar, should display on this blogpage (+ archive pages but that part works).

Now that you get (I hope) what I’m trying to do, the problem :
I used the is_page_template in the sidebar.php to make conditionnal statement and check weather or not I’m on the blog template like this :

<?php
if ( is_page_template('blog_template.php') ) {
// here comes my blogsidebar with archive + category links
echo "blog template";
}
elseif ( (is_category())OR(is_single())OR(is_archive())){
// here comes my blogsidebar with archive + category links
echo "archive template";
}
else {
// here comes the "page" sidebar with the list of child pages
echo "normal page";
<?php endif;
}
?>

The two last ones work fine, but not the first one.

The weird part : in my template (blog_template.php) if I call <?php get_sidebar(); ?> AFTER the query_posts + loop, it won’t work, and my echo test gets me “archive template” . If I call <?php get_sidebar(); ?> BEFORE I call the <?php get_sidebar(); ?>, the is_page_template works and the echo test gets me a “blog template”. It seams that wordpress “forgets” he is on the blog-template after my loop. I just don’t get it. I think I might have made a mistake somewhere but after two days looking on google, wordpresscodex and blogs, I did not find anything.

Here is my query and loop, maybe I did something wrong here :
[Code moderated as per the Forum Rules. Please use the pastebin]

This is the loop used in the twenty-ten theme to get the archives. Since I copied / pasted it, I assume that the mistake I’m making is in the query itself ?

For the moment I’ve two solutions :
– I can let the <?php get_sidebar(); ?> in blog-template after the loop, and the sidebar will display the same as for archives. Works fine, but not great for further changes (and I have to admit I don’t understand why this works)
– I can remove <?php get_sidebar(); ?> from the blog-template, and put the hardcore code of my sidebar instead. Here again, not great for flexibility, if I change my mind later, I will have to maintain two files (sidebar + blog-template) instead of just one.

I’m not quite happy with both solutions, but most of all, I really want to understand what went wrong with my sidebar/is_page_template() to avoid further mistakes so if anybody has got an explantion it would be great !!

Thanx a lot 🙂