Adding Extra Sidebar to your Wordpress Theme
You like a Wordpress theme on the Internet but Oh!… What’s this?? The theme has only one sidebar! You need more than one and are on the verge of switching to some other theme with more sidebars. But wait!! Let me teach you how to add an extra sidebar or sidebars to your favorite theme. People who know PHP will find it easy to follow but even novices can easily do it using the code that I have provided in this tutorial. I am assuming that you already know HTML and a bit of CSS.
To begin the tutorial, extract your theme into a folder and open it to see all the files. If your theme has only one sidebar, then most probably you will NOT find a file called functions.php in your theme folder. In that case you will have to create this file yourself. Just open notepad or any other code editor to start a new file. Put this code into that file :-
<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebars') )
register_sidebars(2);
?>
Save the file as functions.php and put it in your theme folder. This piece of code actually tells Wordpress to register two sidebars for you (See register_sidebars(2) in the code). If your theme has more than one sidebar, you will find the functions.php file already present in your theme folder. You just have to edit the number to your requirement and save the file. You can increase this number if you want more sidebars and if your theme’s layout can accommodate it. Now, when you go to your Wordpress admin section and browse to the widgets under the menu item called presentation, you will see two sidebars listed there. You can drag your widget items into any of the sidebars.
Now comes the part where we actually build the sidebars. If your theme has only one sidebar, try to locate a file called sidebar.php in your theme folder. In this example, where we are trying to modify the theme for two sidebars, let’s rename sidebar.php to sidebar1.php and make a new blank file called sidebar2.php. Put this code into sidebar2.php and save the file :-
<div>
<ul>
<?php if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar(2) ) : else : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>
</div>
So, we have the two sidebars ready but they have not been placed in the index.php file yet. Both these sidebars need to be called from the index.php file in order to include them in your theme. Just open the index.php file from your theme folder and locate the code that calls your sidebar file (sidebar.php earlier). It should look something like :-
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar.php'); ?>
Edit this code and change the words sidebar.php to sidebar1.php.
This takes care of the first sidebar. Now take a look at the index.php file carefully and find a suitable place to insert the second sidebar. This might involve modifying your layout or adding new divs. Once you find a suitable place, place the following code there :-
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar2.php'); ?>
Save the index.php file and now preview your theme. You will see all the widgets that you placed in both your sidebars appearing on your website. If you have not placed any widgets yet, you will not see any change. There might be alignment errors but you will have to fix them yourself. You can add more sidebars in a similar way to your Wordpress theme. I hope this tutorial helps some of you.
Great tutorial, worked perfectly for me. Thank you!
This is great!! Thanks. Is there anyway i can get only specific sidebars to appear on specific pages?
@Valerie:-
Found it! It was under *layout* #c1 and #c2
I was wondering if you had a quick fix for changing the width of the sidebar?
In my css there is no #siderbar stuff to change the width.
Great post!
Thanks!
I have a wp blog and we have two sidebars which is ok, but …
the far right sidebar is ok but the middle sidebar which is thin.
Both sidebars stay the same for all pages but the home page, what I would like is that on some pages the sidebar is different than on other pages. As an example we have a page called coaching, well on that page, we want to sidebar to list testimonials of coaching students, and on the page that is speaking we want the sidebar to have testimonials of speaking clients.
Is this possible?
Hello. Thank you kind sir.
Wow! You made this really straight-forward and simple! Worked perfectly on the Prosense theme which I’m using for my blog.
Thanks!
I have a dynamic Sidebar Left and Right, I disabled the sidebar right so that I could have more “content” space for my home page, however my problem is that when I add a widget to the left sidebar No links will show up..in other words you can see the ad or button but the link within the widget will not work. I’m using what they call a “Simple Image Link” and it works until I get to the 3 or 4th spot in the sidebar. Its almost as if the original “pages” and wp page list is still there even though I disabled it…however maybe the way I disabled it has effected that “area” so even if I had a widget in that first position it just won’t work?? I simply deleted the h3 pages and wp list pages?? Maybe that’s where I made the mistake??
Freaking genius. I know zip about code but was able to create another sidebar for my site. Thank you, thank you, thank you.