Justin Tadlock, who’s work I admire, posted over on his blog about something that I’ve been thinking about myself for quite some time.
Killing the Sidebar.
WordPress enables us to widgetize virtually any area of our blog, so why exactly do you want to call a widgetized footer as a “Footer Sidebar” or similarly if it was in the header section as a “Header Sidebar”?
The only thing limiting many theme developers from using widgets in a whole new fashion is probably the methodology to implement them. Naming sidebars is probably the best option to do so, but in some of my trials I’ve noticed that if you are using a theme with “named” widget areas, for example - “footer widget”, “header widget” and so on, and if you revert back to a theme, or upgrade to a new one, that doesn’t use a naming architecture then chances are you will have a lot of changes to make to your blog.
Justin has some code that takes a try in helping out with the process, I’ll give it a shot in one of my themes and see how it shapes up.
Thanks for the nod. Ian Stewart is the man that should get most of the credit for bringing the idea to the forefront though.
I think if we start using a good, solid naming architecture, some of the drawbacks of changing themes might not be as bad. Of course, we’d need someone to come up with a naming architecture.
I like to think of things in terms of where they go and on what page. So, a sidebar for the home page is “Sidebar Home.” A widget area for the header on the home page would be “Header Home.” Others might have different naming conventions, but I like to keep mine fairly simple, so I can carry them from one theme to the next.
The code from the post seems to work out well. Even though it’s just sidebars, I have one user of my Options theme with almost 50 different sidebars for various bands, each with their own individual page using this technique.
I agree on the naming architecture, I guess if theme developers can reach a consensus on how to approach it and decide, perhaps we could move forward with it.