Creating a sidebar without sidebar.php advice

  • Perhaps I’m making things hard for myself – but I really don’t like sidebars, but for the site I’m going to work on I will need a sidebar of sorts. It will perhaps have 2-3 calls to a specific category or two and include the footer credits.

    I’ve drawn a rought sketch of the design I’ll work on – but I wonder, do you actually like the sidebar.php? Does it offer any greater advantage over creating a second column with a single column theme?

    How difficicult is to create a second column in perhaps an existing single column theme? I just don’t want to screw around with another file – I think 2 or 3, is fine, but when you start including things like seperate x, y and z it gets a bit too much. I know it offers more flexibility, but it also feels like more work. If I can build the site by using a second column float, without including sidebar.php that might work better. I’m not sure, but I would like some advice on this.

    Thank you.

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  • sidebar.php is merely an include, you can make it whatever you want.

    I like it because it makes it more modular, so I can inlcude it (or not) on other pages.

    That said, a theme can consist of as many or as few files as you want. You can have everything in index.php, or broken out. It’s all up to you.

    Tg

    Yea, like omanno said, the sidebar is only an include. If you were to just copy the code from the sidebar.php file and paste it into your index, you’d have the same exact thing. A 2 column layout without a “sidebar” include.

    A 2 column float is going to require you to put some content into it. It would be no different than the content you currently use in a sidebar.php file, just located in one file instead of spread over a few files. It wouldn’t work any better or any worse really, it would just depend on how you want the code to look to you.

    I think it comes down to the complexity of a specific theme’s template framework.

    If using one or perhaps two top level, query-based templates for a theme, logically segmenting components of the design into discrete files may make it a bit more complicated to maintain. In the case of my current theme, I have nearly twenty templates (I think seven of are top-level). Having the menu stored in its own template file tremendously simplifies things.

    I think we have two or three ways we can do this. Use a sidebar and a lot of if else chicanery. Scrap it and hard code your main templates. Do a bit of both.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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