oik-sidebar plugin

The oik-sidebar plugin is special code for people using Artisteer themes who also want to use the Widget Wrangler plugin.

In How to control which widget appears on a particular page (on the Bobbing Wide web development blog) I documented the work I did to get the Widget Wrangler plugin to work within an Artisteer (2.6) theme.

I have now done the same for Artisteer 3.0.

Extract from oik-sidebar plugin comments

Note: for this plugin to do anything you need to do the following:

• change your Artisteer theme to call bw_dynamic_sidebar instead of art_dynamic_sidebar
• install the Widget Wrangler plugin
• define Widget Wrangler sidebars for each dynamic sidebar you want to control
• The sidebar names you may use are:
  • Artisteer 2.6
    • default_before
    • default_after
    • secondary_before
    • secondary_after
  • Artisteer 3
    • as for Artisteer 2.6 plus you can have _before and/or _after versions for the other sidebars: top, top2, bottom, bottom2, footer, footer2, footer3 and footer4

To change all new Artisteer themes

It’s possible to change the Artisteer source files so that you only have to make the change once. Any newly generated themes will automatically include the required code (if activated).

To do this change the Library\data\templates\WordPress\Export\files\library\sidebars.php file to invoke the  bw_dynamic_sidebar function if the  oik-sidebar plugin is installed and activated.

<code>

function art_get_dynamic_sidebar_data($name) {
global $art_widget_args, $art_sidebars;

if (!function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’)) return false;
ob_start();

if (function_exists( ‘bw_dynamic_sidebar’ )) {
$success = bw_dynamic_sidebar( $name );
}
else {
$success = dynamic_sidebar($art_sidebars[$name]['id']);
}

</code>

Do you have examples of this in action?

All in good time… I’ve just realised I don’t actually know how to do this for category displays!