Community Forums › Forums › Archived Forums › General Discussion › Is there a limit to how many sidebars you can use?
- This topic has 6 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 11 years, 1 month ago by XyZed.
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February 15, 2013 at 5:26 am #20494XyZedMember
Genesis framework is the best. I'm finding the ability to create different sidebars using simple sidebars absolutely brilliant. It means I can display different ads and different articles in the right sidebar for appropriate pages or sections. My worry is that if I use too many it could have resource problems?
I currently have about 12 custom sidebars. Does anyone know if there is a limit to how many you can use or does it not matter because each page just fetches the appropriate sidebar as and when needed
February 19, 2013 at 11:48 am #21380cehwithamMemberI don't believe there is an upper limit but it may become resource intensive if you get huge amounts of them. One solution would be to look at a caching plugin to cache the pages so the sidebar doesn't have to be queried on each page load.
Chris
Twitter: cehwitham Web: cehwitham.com
February 20, 2013 at 6:11 am #21618XyZedMemberThank you Chris. I think what I want to do may be impractical because I'd like to have a different sidebar for each page, which could get ridiculous. However, if each page has a different side bar - wouldn't caching not load the right one when they went to another page or am I misunderstanding?
The reason I want to do this makes a lot of sense to me (and hopefully others), and potentially beneficial for a lot of Genesis theme users so it would be great if a way to do it could be found.
I believe most wordpress sites have content on the left and adverts in the sidebar, and that users quickly realise this, and start to ignore the sidebar. I also find that many articles have a long entry on the main left column and just a few affiliate ads in the sidebar with loads of blank space when you scroll down.
If the sidebar contained parts of the genuine content of a page, and the ads were just placed in there too - then people would read all of the page, it would look better too 🙂
Here's an example of a quite long page I have using this technique
http://www.whitegoodshelp.co.uk/tumble-dryer-buying-advice/
and here's an example of a normal page with a standard sidebar, which you can see is just full of ads, and the content on the left far outweighs content in the sidebar giving it an unsatisfactory lop-sided look
http://www.whitegoodshelp.co.uk/do-i-have-to-wait-in-all-day-for-an-engineer/
People seeing articles on the latter will quickly learn to ignore the sidebar because it's just ads, but on a site displaying content like my first example, people will read all of the page - and it just looks better.
February 20, 2013 at 12:05 pm #21707cehwithamMemberI see what you're trying to achieve. I think the best way to do this would be to add two (or more) custom fields to each page with titles like Sidebar Content 1 and Sidebar Content 2. The value of each one would be the page ID of the related content that you wanted to display in the sidebar (you could alternatively use posts).
In your sidebar you'd then add code to output the content of the Sidebar Content 1 page/post, then some adverts, then the content of Sidebar Content 2 page/post and then output more adverts.
This would mean you only needed one sidebar for the whole site yet the content in the sidebar would vary based on which page you were viewing.
I hope that helps. I'm sorry I don't have time to write the code for it right now.
Twitter: cehwitham Web: cehwitham.com
February 21, 2013 at 5:17 am #21919XyZedMemberThank you for that. Could anything be achieved using simple edits by any chance? I still think this idea (feature) would be something that should be included for everyone to use.
March 18, 2013 at 5:17 pm #29209AngelaEloiseMemberHi!
You seem to be doing something with your sidebars that I'm trying to do, so I was wondering if you wouldn't mind helping me?
I want to create a sidebar that will appear on single post, archive, category pages that is different from the primary sidebar on the home page. I created a custom sidebar in Simple Sidebars, but I don't know where or how to add this to the PHP to achieve the desired effect.
I've installed the Layout Extras plugin. This lets me specify what kind of layout each page will have, but not what sidebar will appear on each page. I don't want to add additional columns to any page; I just want to be able to control which content is visible in the sidebar on pages other than the home page.
I'm new to Genesis and still trying to figure out how to customize. I don't really know how to code PHP but can make simple edits given an example.
Any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated!
Angela
March 19, 2013 at 5:12 am #29376XyZedMemberHello Angela. I just create a sidebar named after the page I want it to appear on, then edit the page I want it to show on and select the sidebar from the drop down menu on the right where it says "Sidebar selection" - Primary sidebar.
It's working fantastic for me, turns a boring blog with predictable ads that can be ignored always on the right column into a blog where many pages have proper content spread across the entire page, with relevant ads placed amongst them.
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