Option to Remove Inheritance

Hi @wpismypuppet,

Hope you’re well today!

Hmm, it’s possible I’ve misunderstood something here but you can select page specific sidebars by editing the Page in question and selecting a sidebar in that editing screen.

Is that perhaps what you’re looking for?

Though if I’ve misunderstood, please feel free to let me know. I’ll be happy to have another look. ??

Thanks,
David

Hi David,

I am aware that I can override the parent sidebar by going into a child page and selecting a different sidebar altogether. However, what I am looking for is a way to opt out of the parent inheritance! So basically, if I have a parent page, and I choose a sidebar for that parent, all of it’s children will have the same sidebar (unless I visit each child page and select a different sidebar). But what if I don’t want the child page to have ANY sidebar? How do I stop the parent from propagating down to it’s children?

In your version 0.8.2, this was not an issue as the parent page’s sidebar didn’t trickle down to the children. So what I was asking for is a mix of the old and the new. Leave it the way it works, but when you visit the custom sidebar page (where you create custom sidebars) offer a check box for EACH sidebar created to disable parent inheritance. This way, by default it will propagate down to the children. But if you check the box, the children won’t have any sidebar unless you visit the child page and say otherwise.

Does that make more sense?

Hi @wpismypuppet,

Yep that makes perfect sense. I’m actually looking through the code to see if there’s a simple solution.

But I’ll also mention this to the developers to see if that can be done with a future version.

Thanks for your feedback with this. Anything more I can find, I’ll update here right away.

Cheers,
David

I’m also coming up against this problem and notice that it’s only the case for the immediate children of a page with custom sidebars. This begs the question what the use-case for this is – surely if you want inherited custom sidebars you’d want them all the way down.

As a new user I’d prefer opt-in inheritance but I can understand to maintain b/c it may be necessary to opt out of it. I’d prefer a opt out per sidebar rather than per child page.

Hi Michael, thanks for chiming in and yeah, it’d definitely help as far as existing sites using the plugin, to not have anything change here that would affect them otherwise.

Thus the simplest way to do it is to provide a basic code adjustment.

@wpismypuppet, the following should help with this in your case…

On line 233 of \custom-sidebars\customsidebars.php, you’ll see:

if($post->post_parent != 0 && $this->replacements_todo > 0){
$replacements = get_post_meta($post->post_parent, $this->postmeta_key, TRUE);

You should be able to change that like so:

$parents = get_post_ancestors( $post->ID );
$post_parent = ($parents) ? $parents[count($parents)-1]: 0;
if($post_parent != 0 && $this->replacements_todo > 0){
$replacements = get_post_meta($post_parent, $this->postmeta_key, TRUE);

And that should have all the child pages follow the parent page’s sidebars by default.

Perhaps that’ll do the trick for ya?

Hi Michael, thanks for chiming in and yeah, it’d definitely help as far as existing sites using the plugin, to not have anything change here that would affect them otherwise.

Thus the simplest way to do it is to provide a basic code adjustment.

@wpismypuppet, the following should help with this in your case…

On line 233 of \custom-sidebars\customsidebars.php, you’ll see:

if($post->post_parent != 0 && $this->replacements_todo > 0){
$replacements = get_post_meta($post->post_parent, $this->postmeta_key, TRUE);

You should be able to change that like so:

$parents = get_post_ancestors( $post->ID );
$post_parent = ($parents) ? $parents[count($parents)-1]: 0;
if($post_parent != 0 && $this->replacements_todo > 0){
$replacements = get_post_meta($post->post_parent, $this->postmeta_key, TRUE);

And that should have all the child pages follow the parent page’s sidebars by default.

Perhaps that’ll do the trick for ya?

Hey David,

This solution looks like it helps Michael Nolan more than me. What it looks like your code adjustment does is makes sure that all the children of a parent inherits the sidebar. And that’s a great solution as it could potentially be an issue.

My concern, however, is to STOP propagating the sidebar down to the children, if I so choose. Currently I have no choice other than visiting each and every child page and choosing a different sidebar. If I don’t want the children to have a sidebar at all, there is not way to stop this.

My suggestion is to leave the code exactly how it is… and let it continue to run the same way it currently runs (so as not to break current websites). However, all I’m suggesting is when you visit “Appearance->Custom Sidebars”, and you see all of your sidebars listed in the section “All the Custom Sidebars”, there be a check box to STOP the children pages from inheriting this sidebar.

By checking this box, you essentially makes the sidebar only appear on pages you physically visit and choose to use this sidebar. It essentially removes any automatic inheritance. This method is a good solve because a) it keeps everything running exactly as it currently does and b) give the option PER SIDEBAR to make the sidebar lose inheritance if so desired.

In fact, that snippet of code you sent me is probably where to do it. Just add a check box per sidebar to store the value “on” or no value at all. Then in your snippet add an extra check for that value. If it equals “on”, don’t do the $replacements piece. If it’s an empty value, continue on.

Again, if you need some help in writing the code, I’d be happy to assist. I as only because you are more familiar with your own code and would probably be able to do this much faster. If you would like help, I can start digging through and share what I find with you.

Please let me know if this helps and makes more sense. I appreciate your help with this, and your willingness to listen and apply changes and updates to your code! Thanks again.

Hey there @wpismypuppet,

Really sorry for the delay here! Incidentally, we’re looking at the possibility of providing a premium version of the plugin, where we could then easily address such feature additions directly through our developers.

For now though, we don’t really have the resources to easily add features like this, though I do think it’s a nicely useful one.

What we can do for now is point you in the direction needed to best accommodate, in lieu of not being able easily add more features right now.

In this case, if you don’t want a particular page to take the sidebar of its parent, you’d have to do it in the conditional statement, for example like so:

$parents = get_post_ancestors( $post->ID );
$post_parent = ($parents) ? $parents[count($parents)-1]: 0;
if($post_parent != 0 && $this->replacements_todo > 0 && $post->ID != 1){
$replacements = get_post_meta($post->post_parent, $this->postmeta_key, TRUE);

You’d just need to change:

$post->ID != 1

To be whatever Page ID you want. Of course, it’d be best to do it with an array for the Pages, but I hope that helps with it.

Any questions on this, please feel free to ask and I’ll do my best to assist. ??

Thanks,
David