ravisarma

I think is_active_sidebar() will tell you if the sidebar has any widgets (“is active”). Caution: though the codex suggests that it takes as arg a sidebar ID or name, using name does not seem to work. This seems to have been reported in Trac and a patch provided a while ago, but I am not sure where that stands.

SeancoJr, upgrade now. Response Tracker is worth it! 😉 😉

@noisedude, @alchymyth, thank you for the kind comments.

StarCapt, just to be clear: when you say you view the post after publishing it, what is the URL at which you view the post? Is this URL the top level URL for your blog or the individual URL for that particular post?

I am the much reviled theme author and here is the previous thread that StarCapt is referring to:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/334059

alchymyth’s response is fairly on target, provided you do want edit/comment/etc boxes in your index page. If what (s)he suggests does not work well, please contact me.

Regarding this thread:

I did not in any way respond to StarCapt that “anyone who posts only one blog at a time is somehow out of line with everyone else”. Not sure where he gets that impression from, but the point I was making in my comment (in the thread linked to above) is this: typically, in WP blogs/themes, the index/home page lists a series of recent posts and provides additional actions, comments, etc in the individual post page that can be visited by clicking on any of the index page posts. That is the design of Ahimsa as well.

There is nothing “out of line” in your wanting a different layout. Alchymyth’s response gives the code to do that. I don’t monitor the WP forums frequently, or I would have posted something similar. If you have questions I would prefer an email if you want a quicker response. I have also added the RSS feed for forum search “Ahimsa” to my feed reader so I see such questions/responses earlier.

On reading your comment further, it does seem like you are talking about the main home/index page vs the single/post page. Ignore the following explication if you are aware of it: in WordPress, unless you have set your home page to be a static page, what is typically shown to your visitors is a set of 5 or so posts. The general practise, in themes, is to then allow the viewer to click on the post title, a permanent link or some other element (such as a “read more…” link, or a “Comments” link) to view the post (sometimes called a single post), with all related comments. That’s the implementation in Ahimsa as well. In your case, you have only one post (I think) and you have turned off the sidebar fading, so your home page and the post page for your single post look the same — except, as per the design, the single post page includes comments and the links for editing, commenting, etc.

maverickkhan, is iblogger.org running WP? If so, you can go to the Dashboard and use Appearance -> Themes and search for and install themes such as Ahimsa.