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I wrote sometime ago about the visual design of a website, particularly a WordPress blog, and lamented the long sidebar that plagues so many sites. Like anyone else, I want to show everything I have to offer to my readers, but I know that my readers don’t necessarily want the same. End-users want the information they want and nothing else that might distract them from that information. Readers want data to be concisely presented and easy-to-read. A sidebar as long as my arm detracts from these goals.

Therefore, when I added some things to my WordPress sidebar (like a blogroll) that made it particularly long, I knew something had to be done. It’s all fine and well on the main page where ten blog entries make for a rather long site (and therefore the sidebar doesn’t look out of place). But when looking at a single post, the sidebar added a dozen inches below the comment box until you reached the footer. No good.

The WordPress Codex has some tips on creating a second sidebar and using this for other pages (such as when viewing just a single post), but beyond giving me the PHP tag for the sidebar, it didn’t do me a lot of good. The theme I use did not have the sidebar statement in the default location (which is normally sidebar.php in your theme’s files), and when I did find the code I needed to change, the tag listed in the WordPress Codex didn’t work.

My sidebar actually extends up from the footer, so it was the footer.php I needed to edit. Removing the standard sidebar tag, I entered the following:

<div id="sidebar">
<?php if (is_single()) : ?>
 <?php include ('sidebar2.php'); ?>
<?php else : ?>
    <?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>

When I first made this change, I discovered that, while it worked great for posts, my pages still had the longer sidebar. Since my Contact page is pretty short, this ran into the same problem as before: the page content had ended, but the sidebar just kept going. Therefore, the code needed to be modified slightly to accommodate pages as well as single posts.

<div id="sidebar">
<?php if (is_page()) : ?>
    <?php include ('sidebar2.php'); ?>
<?php elseif (is_single()) : ?>
    <?php include ('sidebar2.php'); ?>
<?php else : ?>
    <?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>

Using an elseif statement, we are able to use sidebar2.php on both pages and single posts. If you have additional templates on which you wish to use a different sidebar (say you wanted a different sidebar on the category, archive, and portfolio pages as well), you might considering using a switch, but with my limited knowledge of PHP, usingif/elseif/else statements worked just fine for me.