WordPress Sidebars

It has been awhile since my last post, and aside from trying to understand wordpress a lot has been keeping me busy.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I was asked to create a wordpress theme with widgets all over, left, right, bottom, and top. Searching through the wordpress codex documentation and in some other blogs, I came across about registering a sidebar. Now how do you do that? after several hours of searching and experimenting how things work I found that you need to register it under the functions.php file of your theme.

Here is a sample of it:

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )

register_sidebar(array(

'name'=>'sidebar1',

'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget"><div class="widget-top"></div><div class="widget-content">',

'after_widget' => '</div></li>',

'before_title' => '<h4 class="widget-title">',

'after_title' => '</h4>',

));

register_sidebar(array('name'=>'sidebar2',

));

register_sidebar(array('name'=>'sidebar3',

));

?>

I guess it is pretty straightforward, and I don't think I need to explain the before and after thing, to know more about sidebars you could check this link out.

Below is a sample of displaying the widgets on a sidebar:

<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>

But there is still a lingering question in my mind, having worked with a lot of Joomla templates and its predecessor Mambo, I am used to the module positions where I could put it anywhere on the template, with a lot more ease and less pain than Wordpress. I could control the module without having to code heavily. The question is can you count the number of widgets in a sidebar. What I usually do in Joomla is count the modules in a module position if it is greater tha zero then the width of the other column would be much wider, or lets say that the sidebar will collapse or be invisible.

Anyway Wordpress seems to have an answer to this, you could either make a template for a specific page and by default there is the single.php page you could make which could not have any sidebars at all. Having said that maybe my next topic would be about templates.