dshafer

Michael…..

Two things.

First, WOW. Thank you SO much for your quick and obviously informed reply. (I think I may actually understand your code and that’s frightening in itself!) ??

Second, holy crap this stuff is complicated. I don’t mean this PHP is so complex in itself, but to figure out how to get here from where I was? That’s a world or two away. I was obviously wrong that using query_posts with some specific argument string would get this job done. That is both enlightening and disconcerting. Evidently, WordPress just below the surface of what’s built in is what I used to call back in my younger days as a real programmer, “non-trivial.”

Thanks again. Now I have to rethink whether I really want to invest this much effort in learning WordPress when I already know other platforms.

Well, some progress, sort of accidentally. I found that if rather than encompassing the entire contents of the sidebar.php file in the if statement about the dynamic_sidebar function, I just put everything I want in the sidebar outside of that conditional, both my content and the widget show up. Now I just have to figure out how to get them in the order I want them and I’ll be all set.

My guess is that my failing here isn’t with WP, it’s with PHP. I should have spent a bit more time analyzing the logic in the sidebar after I added dynamic_sidebar and register_sidebar code.

Sorry for the noise level here, but maybe some other relative newcomer will read this 10 years from now and see why things don’t work the way they appear to work.

Sigh. I’ve spent three hours today on this problem and even though I consider myself to be reasonably adept at site development and programming, this one eludes me. It appears that sidebar work in WP is either a bit of a kluge or is undergoing continuing shifting. Even the Codex docs say as much.

I got the sidebar widgetized. The widget I wanted to add showed up fine. Now none of my own added content is appearing at all. Just the widget. I’ve tried converting the whole thing to an unordered list per doc recommendations to no avail. I’m just out of ideas and time. I am beginning to suspect that perhaps I just started out wrong and it’s never been able to get right and may never be able to do so. Unfortunately, I’m missing a deadline mucking with it.

The learning curve here seems awfully steep to me.

Thanks, esmi. So am I correct in understanding that a file called sidebar.php — which is what I used from the template files — won’t do, that it has to have something more to its name?

I’m off to see if I can find that answer in the Codex or one of these WP books I have.