Flash by Z | The eclectic blogoshpere

Did you ever see WordPress blogs that have a separate header for different categories or a different sidebar for the single.php template page? In this article, I am going to show you a couple of different ways to achieve this functionality. You can use these simple snippets to add a custom header or even a secondary sidebar for each WordPress category. First for the simple header snippet, in your index.php page, change your normal header to this:

<?php if (is_category('wordpress')) {
get_header('wordpress');
} else {
get_header();
} ?>

The snippet above will tell WordPress that a visitor in your “wordpress” category. WordPress will then display a file called header-wordpress.php. If it does not exist WordPress will display your default header file. The next snippet will look for sidebar-wordpress.php to replace the default file if the category is wordpress.To get a “special” sidebar for this category, you only need to do is add the following code:

<?php if (is_category('wordpress')) {
get_sidebar('wordpress');
} else {
get_sidebar();
} ?>

You can do the same with your footer file. Just remember to change the hook from get_sidebar(); to get_footer();.

Another way to display a separate sidebar based on visitor location is to simply create a new file called sidebar2.php, sidebar_single.php or something easy for you to remember. This particular theme has a sidebar2.php strictly setup for the single.php template. Clear as mud? Basically, I did not want the long sidebar that my default index.php utilizes to show up on a post with a short page. Simple, huh?

Replace the sidebar hook <?php get_sidebar(); ?> on your single.php with your include <?php include ('sidebar2.php'); ?>.

My new sidebar2.php does not use widgets but I still use the same class style tags to stay with the theme.

<div class="widget">
<h4><?php _e('Pages',''); ?></h4>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=' ); ?>
</ul>
</div>

I hope you found this useful. Coding is poetry in motion.

Z

Tags: Dynamic, Includes, WordPress