Dynamic Page-Specific Sidebars

  • 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!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter phejster

    (@phejster)

    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?

    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

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

    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.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Dynamic Page-Specific Sidebars’ is closed to new replies.