Genesis Snippets

A reference for Genesis theme developers

sidebars

Display a custom sidebar on a custom post type

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Here’s how to replace the primary sidebar on a custom post type. First, register your sidebar. Next, use this code to swap the primary sidebar with the new one you just registered:

// Swap sidebars on CPT pages
add_action('get_header','child_change_genesis_sidebar');
function child_change_genesis_sidebar() {
	if ( is_singular('post_type')) { // change 'post_type' to your CPT slug
		remove_action( 'genesis_sidebar', 'genesis_do_sidebar' ); //remove the default genesis sidebar
		add_action( 'genesis_sidebar', 'child_do_cpt_sidebar' ); //add an action hook to call the function for my custom sidebar
	}
}
 
// Output sidebar with the id 'sidebar-custom'
function child_do_cpt_sidebar() {
	genesis_widget_area( 'sidebar-custom' );
}

If you want to display the sidebar on both the single post page and archive page for your custom post type, modify the if statement in child_change_genesis_sidebar() function to include

if ( is_singular('post_type') || is_post_type_archive('post_type') ) {

Credit: Carrie Dils & Travis Smith from How to Use a Custom Sidebar on a Custom Post Type

Unregister sidebars

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Don’t need the header right widget area? Or perhaps you don’t need 3 columns for your theme. Then your widget areas a.k.a. sidebars are redundant. Unregister them with the following:

/** Unregister default sidebars */
unregister_sidebar( 'header-right' );
unregister_sidebar( 'sidebar' );
unregister_sidebar( 'sidebar-alt' );

Register new widget areas

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First, register a new sidebar. The before_widget, after_widget, before_title and after_title arguments are optional and allow you to customize the HTML output.

genesis_register_sidebar(
	array(
		'name'=>'Custom Sidebar',
		'id' => 'sidebar-custom',
		'description' => 'This is a custom sidebar',
		'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s"><div class="widget-wrap">',
		'after_widget'  => "</div></div>",
		'before_title'  => '<h4 class="widgettitle">',
		'after_title'   => "</h4>"
	)
);

Then inject the sidebar into the appropriate hook with genesis_widget_area(). The function conditionally displays a widget area. 

add_action( 'genesis_sidebar', 'child_do_sidebar' );
function child_do_sidebar() {
	genesis_widget_area( 'sidebar-custom',
		array(
			'before' => '<div id="sidebar-custom">',
		)
	);
}

See the available arguments for genesis_widget_area() in /genesis/lib/functions/widgetize.php

Update 28 Dec 2012: Replaced dynamic_sidebar() with genesis_widget_area()