How to create custom sidebars for specific pages in your site.

On my site, I have four pages where I post my commentary on the news of the day in the areas of Videoconferencing, Information Technology Security, Project Management, and Distance Education. Rather than have the standard sidebar in each of these pages, or use a template without the sidebar, I decided that I wanted to have a sidebar that was unique to each of these pages. One that I could customize in the control panel for each news section. Here is the method that I came up with:

1. Create page templates for each of the news sections. In this case, I copied the page.php file into four new files: pagede.php (for distance learning), pageitsec.php (for IT Security), pagepm.php (for project management) and pagevtc.php for videoconferencing news).

2. In each of these, I modified the following line from:

3. I used these templates for my pages instead of the default page template. I created my four pages and recorded the PageID for each one for use in the next step.

4. I then created a new file called sidebar-news.php with the following code. You can see that the code that the page I created with the distance education template has an id of 1200 and will be displaying whatever is placed in the distanceed-widget-area. This is done for each of the pages for which you want to select custom templates. Note that the name of your dynamic sidebar must be lowercase and have the “-widget-area” at the end.

5). Then we have to add the additional widget areas (sidebars) in the admin page. I edited the functions.php to add the following lines to the function twentyten_widgets_init() {

After this step you will have the new widget areas listed in the control panel as below. You can then add your widgets as you deem appropriate.