Today I ran into an interesting problem while developing a BuddyPress theme. I was attempting to include a custom sidebar using PHP’s “include” function. The Wordpress codex page on “include tags” gives us this:
<?php include( TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/sidebar-index.php’ ); ?>
The problem is that the above code doesn’t always work when you are utilizing a child theme (I am building a child theme based on the default BuddyPress theme). Rather, you should use the “locate_template” hook:
<?php locate_template( array( ’sidebar-index.php’ ), true ) ?>
What the “locate_template” hook does is searches the child theme’s template folder before searching the parent theme’s template folder.
Pretty nifty, eh?
4 comments ↓
thanks this works perfect…
thanks for sharing.this is why I like wordpress ,community is awesome!
Hello, I’m facing some problem with this method, I tried to use a hook in child functions.php so I won’t touch files directly, but that didn’t work. Could you drop me a line via mail so I can show you what I’ve done and maybe show me where’s the error.
Marco,
Can you explain a little bit more?
So far, I have only used the “locate_template” hook from a child theme’s page and post template files, so I can’t vouch for how it might work in the functions.php file.
Hello, here’s what I’ve done in functions.php (shouty is the site theme name):
/*define constant*/
define(‘SHOUTY_DIR’, STYLESHEETPATH);
then:
/*here we insert, after the regular sidebar, Shouty’s left sidebar*/
add_action(‘bp_after_sidebar’, ’shouty_include_sidebar_left’);
function shouty_include_sidebar_left() {
require(SHOUTY_DIR.’/sidebar_left.php’);
}
But this does not load the sidebar_left.php givin an error of file/folder not found in child theme dir, even though is actually there and I can’t figure why. I use this method with frameworks like Hybrid, Thematic and the new Genesis and it always works well.
ps. I tried hardcoding but doesn’t work either.
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