Sidebars are a bit like the poor child of WordPress theme development. Most themes include a pretty standard boring sidebar positioned to the left or right of the main post/page area (that includes our theme too!). I think this is as much about where WordPress has come from; starting life as a basic simple blogging system where the sidebar was pretty restricted.
Fast forward to the end of 2010 and the scope of what can be done with sidebars has come on quite significantly but still most theme developers still make themes with pretty basic sidebar functionality.
Once again Justin Tadlock shines a light on this all too frequent pattern in his post from November and clearly and simply outlines what theme developers should be considering when it comes to sidebar development in our themes.
Justin clearly explains how theme developers can make sidebars more sophisticated and how to properly configure sidebars in general. It’s certainly an area I shall be exploring in more detail in the coming weeks and like Justin I would encourage everyone to get more creative when it comes to sidebar design with WordPress. I would still say some other publishing platforms like Joomla! still have a slight edge when it comes to their equivalent of sidebars (module positions). It would be great for the WordPress core to bridge this gap and include innovative plugins like Custom Sidebars as part of core.
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