Add new sidebar

Sparkling
1

Hi!

I’m trying to add a new sidebar. I only want to display this particular sidebar on a category page. Otherwise I want to show the standard sidebar.

I’ve created a new sidebar in functions.php. Like this:

register_sidebar( array(
				'name' => __( 'Dog Sidebar', 'sparkling' ),
				'id' => 'sidebar-2',
				'description' => __( 'Extra sidebar', 'sparkling' ),
				'before_widget' => '<aside id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
				'after_widget' => '</aside>',
				'before_title' => '<h3 class="widget-title">',
				'after_title' => '</h3>',
	) );

This shows the sidebar area under appearance and I’m able to fill it with widgets.

I then created a category specific page called category-dogs.php and in that file i try to call my new sidebar through:

<?php get_sidebar('sidebar-2'); ?>

The problem is that my extra sidebar only appears if the standard sidebar that comes with the theme is empty and doesn’t contain any widgets.

I’ve also created a sidebar-2.php file but I’m not sure if I need it and what I need to change in this file. At the moment I have pasted the code from sidebar.php into it.
In the sidebar.php file there is the following code
<?php if ( ! dynamic_sidebar( ‘sidebar-1’ ) ) : ?>

I tried to change this to sidebar-2 in the sidebar-2.php file but because I’m not sure what is happening in this file I can’t get it to show up on the front end.

2

You might want to look into WooSidebars plugin which will help you to create sidebar without writing your own code.

The one thing I can see without testing your code is that you need to create sidebar-2.php and add
<?php if ( ! dynamic_sidebar( 'sidebar-2' ) ) : ?> in it to call for your newly created sidebar.

Another thing is that your <?php get_sidebar('sidebar-2'); ?> should be like this

<?php get_sidebar('2'); ?> because your new sidebar file is created like sidebar-2.php.

If you would create sidebar-dog.php then function to call for sidebar would be <?php get_sidebar('dog'); ?> Because WordPress will understand that you are talking about sidebar, you just ask for the right one.