Adding a sidebar to subcategory archives

Hello @purtonen,

hope you’re doing good today! ??

Unfortunately this is happening by design. There’s a way to force a sidebar to be used for all Category Archives though, could that work for you?

Warm regards,
Dimitris

I have at least three different sidebars to show on three different categories, so forcing one on all of them isn’t going to work for me.

Ok I found out this myself, the below code pretty much works as I intended:

// Filter Custom Sidebars to include sidebar in subcategory archives
add_filter( 'custom_sidebars_set_location', function( $options, $id, $sidebars, $data ){

  // Go through all registered custom sidebars, category id as index
  foreach ( $options['category_archive'] as $cat_id => $sidebar ) {

    // If the looped category has no sidebar set, just skip it to save time
    if ( empty( $sidebar ) )
      continue;

    // Go through all the category children
    $children = get_term_children( $cat_id, 'category' );
    foreach ( $children as $child ) {

      // If the child category has no sidebar set to it, copy the parent sidebar
      if ( empty( $options['category_archive'][$child] ) ) {
        $options['category_archive'][$child] = $sidebar;
      }

    }

  }

  return $options;
}, 10, 4 );

This applies a filter to the sidebar options when saving the sidebar in wp-admin. The filter goes through the category_archive sidebars, then all the subcategories of that category. If the subcategory has no sidebars set, it copies the parent category sidebar to it.

So now in the admin side, if I add a category archive to the sidebar location and save it, this filter adds all the subcategories to that list aswell.

Hello @purtonen,

I’m really glad for both finding this out and sharing your solution! ??

Warm regards,
Dimitris

Thanks for sharing your solution. I’ll be using this as well!