Sidebars on Blog Posts Missing After Theme Update

NicomIT · July 2019

We just updated the theme to version 21.2.9 and some of the sidebars that were set-up previously on blog posts are now missing. I am able to create a new sidebar under "Appearance" > "Widgets" and add each piece of functionality that is needed. Then implement it in the theme settings under "Sidebars" by putting the name of the new sidebar in the "Use this option to force sidebar for all pages" text field. However that adds the new sidebar to every type of post in the website and we need to have more than one sidebar used depending on what post category you are looking at. For example a news post from 2019 would have links to posts that are under the "news 2019" category in it's sidebar and a post from 2018 would display posts that are under the "news 2018" category. We had this set-up before the update, but I can't find in the theme settings where to apply a unique sidebar to these different types of posts. Any help would be great.

Here is a link to a post on the website (but the sidebar is not enabled):

https://www.acadiene.ca/2019/04/15/circonscriptions-rapport-final/

Bryan · July 2019

Hello,

how did you update the theme? Did you update from a very old version?

It is not normal, or possible that the sidebars would go missing after an update. They are all stored in wordpress and in the database, we do not controll or modify them. We only register them, in wordpress, using a standard methods.

There must have been something wrong with the database or your wordpress in that case.

If the main blog sidebar is set, then it will appear on all of the blog related pages as well, this goes to: posts, category pages, archive etc.

You can only force sidebars for all of the post pages in theme options>sidebars.

thanks

NicomIT · July 2019

Yes, it was an update from a quite older version of the theme. The update was done manually via FTP and I uploaded the new version of the them into the existing theme folder.

I do need to set/force sidebars for the different post pages, but I can't see where or how to do that in the "Sidebars" section under the theme options. Can you provide some additional info on how to do that?

NicomIT · July 2019

I can see each widget that was created for the different types of post pages listed under "Sidebars" > "Manage custom sidebars". But I just can't find where to set each one to the appropriate type of post. For example there would be one for "News 2019", but I don't see in the theme settings where to apply that sidebar to the posts that are under the "News2019" category.

Bryan · July 2019

Ok, so if you want to have a category specific sidebar, then you need to create a blog category and assign posts to it, like you normally would.

Then you will be able to see the new widget area in appearance>widgets

In this case, I have created a "cars" category, and you can see BLOG|Cars widget area:

http://prntscr.com/oh80ru

Remember that this sidebar, will always appear only on CATEGORY pages, not on posts with this category. This is not possible because a post can have multiple categories.

The settins in theme options>sidebars allow you to simply set a designed sidebar and force it to appear on pages,posts or portfolios.

cheers

NicomIT · July 2019

Thanks for the reply Bryan. It's odd, because before the update we
did have unique sidebars on specific posts like I mentioned above and
not post category pages.

I did notice something when editing a post. If you scroll
way down below where the boxes are where you would edit the content there is a
header with a blue background named “LAYOUT” and directly below that there
looks to be options for displaying a sidebar as well as choosing a custom one
for that particular post. So I think if “Right Sidebar” is selected from the
layout options and the sidebar that corresponds with the post you are editing
is selected from the “Sidebar” pulldown menu, it should show the correct one. But it doesn't seem to work when I try that.

Bryan · July 2019

Yes, ofcourse this will work. I was thinking that you wanted somhow to set a global sidebar for posts with a specific category...

You can set the sidebar in each post, and you can also set it globally, like I said before in theme options>sidebars.

This is what could have gone wrong:

1. The sidebar name contains special characters - check if the custom sidebar you have created has no special characters, write only simple names.

2. There are no widgets in the selected sidebar.

3. The main blog page is not set - go to wordpress>settings>reading and select the main blog page as the posts page, this has to be always set.

4. Disable all plugins - this may or may not fix the issue.

5. Make sure that in theme options>sidebars you did not force any setting to not display a sidebar for single posts.

cheers

Sidebars on Blog Posts Missing After Theme Update

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