Dynamic sidebar is a name for an area in your theme that can accept widgets.
Perhaps wrongfully called 'sidebar', it can be referenced anywhere allowing you great flexibility with your theme. Here is the example of available widget areas in a fully implemented dynamic sidebar setup.
Registering dynamic sidebars where you want them
The idea is to think of areas in your theme where you want to be able to easily use the functionality of widgets. Prime candidates are usually footer, single post (before and after), sometimes even header.
Next step is to register the sidebar. Let's say we want to create a dynamic widget area before your posts. Usually you will add something like this to your functions.php
register_sidebar(array( 'name' => 'Single Top', 'id' => 'single-top', 'before_widget' => '<li>', 'after_widget' => "</li>", 'before_title' => "<h3>", 'after_title' => "</h3>, ));
Then open single.php and somewhere at the top of your post loop (before call to the_content() ) add:
<?php if ( is_sidebar_active('single-top') ) { echo '<div id="single-top"><ul>' ; dynamic_sidebar('single-top'); echo '</ul></div>' ; } ?>
That's all !
Now you have a dynamic area at the beginning of your post, where you can add as many widgets as you'd like.
You can register any amount of dynamic sidebars in this way.
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Posted in: WordPress
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Hi! My name is Vladimir Prelovac. I am a computer engineer by profession and an adventurer by state of mind.
9 Comments
This is based on hooks at various points in the PHP headers, index, and footers, etc. I would kill to be able to have a hook inside the loop. For example, on the index PHP I would like to RSS feed for 1 post for every 3rd or 4th post as a plugin instead of having to modify the index.php
Where can this be done?
Thank you.
Chris Kilber
http://www.ChrisKilber.com
Home of 101 Traffic Generating Strategies
Goog article. Thanks, am added code after article
Awesomeness - combine this with exec-php plugin and the use of conditional tags and you can put almost anything in any place dynamically :D
...or you could use the Thematic theme framework. Looks like that's where your image came from:)
The image came from my theme which was based on Thesis framework. However I would not recommend it for casual bloggers, even I have hard time finding my way around it.
Totally agree with Vlad, although using Hooks may seem very easy at first but some php knowledge is desirable to use them properly. It took me around a day or two to get Thesis to work the way I want it to be (prolly because I'm just picky). Oh for the Thesis users, don't forget the OpenHook plugin haha.
"dynamic area at the beginning of your post"
any examples ?
There are two in the post, what did you have in mind? :)
Thanks, this is going to be really handy in inserting things like Adsense. Until reading this, I had always just added the adsense to the single.php straight away, but this will help run things more smoothly!