Blog page right sidebar appearing on left side

[Valerie Mallder]

Hello! I am having an issue that I have been unable to figure out. I started out building my website with a static front page and all was hunky dory. But now I am thinking of making my front page show latest posts of only a certain category. So, to get started, in the theme customizer I changed my front page from static to latest posts – I just wanted to see how it would it look. And now, for someone reason, the blog right sidebar is appearing on the left side. I am using the “Front Page Template – Left & Right Sidebar”.

The site is located at pvda.gaitexpectations.com if you want to take a look. It is currently set to static front page. So, I saved and attached a couple of screen shots for you so you can see what I mean. I put titles at the top of the blog side bars that say which sidebar is it so I could keep track of which ones were being displayed and when. For the most part, I have the same widgets in my page sidebars and blog sidebars.

Once I figure out how to get the sidebars that I want on the front page when I show latest posts, then I will look at limiting the posts to a certain category.

Thanks for your help!
StaticFrontPage.JPG
BlogFrontPage.JPG

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[Sushil Adhikari]

Hi Valerie…your screenshots are not functional, my guess you used the snipping tool from Windows? It saves images with an uppercase extention JPG which is actually not a fully compatible extension on unix servers. If you can for future screenshots, see if you can save the images with a lowercase extension .jpg otherwise they show as broken. It’s a unix server thing (strange I know).

In the mean time, is it possible to save them with a lowercase extension and upload them again here? I did check your site out but noticed you have widgets in both the sidebars but I wasn’t sure which ones were the right and left when you said the right ones are showing in the left sidebar?

[Valerie Mallder]

Sure! Here ya go.
BlogFrontPage.jpg
StaticFrontPage.jpg

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[Sushil Adhikari]

Thanks for the new screenshots. For the blog, if there’s no posts yet, the page columns collapse until something is posted. I’m guessing you had no posts yet?

[Valerie Mallder]

Hmm… I need to apologize, I should have tried one more thing before posting my original message. If I had, then I would have posted a different question.

I’ve been using my child theme and I just went back and applied the parent theme to see if I saw the same thing happening. Well, with the parent theme, the sidebar is on the correct right side,it did not callapse to the left due to having no posts yet. But, it is not using the Page Template with Left AND Right sidebar that it uses when the page is set to a static front page.

So, there seems to be two issues going on here: 1) The right sidebar is appearing on the left in my child theme (which is my fault, I’m sure), and 2) the page template that I selected in the page edit screen is not used for the front page when I set the front page to display latest posts.

Did that make sense?

Here’s a screen dump when using the parent theme and setting my front page to display latest posts.
ParentThemeBlogPage.jpg

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[Sushil Adhikari]

It’s odd the child theme would do that because how a child theme works is that it inherits everything from the parent theme. Without any modifications added to the child theme yet, there should be no change in comparison to using a parent theme. However, if you do one post with the child theme active, does the right sidebar return to the right side with the post?

Correct on the second issue…how WordPress works is that when you create a static front page and a page for the blog, WordPress ignores everything in the editor, including page templates. The only way to get a different layout is for the theme to be coded that way. For instance, my Celestial Reloaded theme has two layout options for the blog that you choose from the theme customizer, either a left or right sidebar layout. But again, WordPress does not do it from a page template selection from the editor….in theory, it would be great if it did.

[Valerie Mallder]

Oh, I have several minor modifications in my child theme, such as a check for is_front_page in a couple of places, changing the width of the sidebars by changing the spanN to what I wanted. So, I will start backing out the files I have in my child theme one by one to see if I can track down the change that is causing the right sidebar to appear on the left side.

Very strange that WordPress ignores the page template setting in the editor. Thanks for letting me know. I won’t spend any more time beating my head against the wall for that one. Ugh. Where is that little tidbit of information located in the Codex? Seems like a bizarre “feature” to me. I’d like to read about it.

But, I really really really want a different page template for my blog page. Can you give me a hint on what code I should be looking at to do what you did in your Celestial theme? I don’t need to add any options to the customizer to make the page layout optional, I just need to force it to use a different layout.

Also, how do you debug your themes? What tool do you use? Often times I would like to find out what .php file generated when I am seeing on the screen. Is there a debugger available to help with this sort of thing?

Thanks for your help!

[Sushil Adhikari]

I noticed the right sidebar was smaller, which it looks like you did it correctly. I saw that and I was like, wait, that’s small, then noticed you did span2.

But as for your right sidebar floating left, again, does it go back with a post in your blog?

I also agree, it would be awesome if that ability to select a blog layout to adopt from the page template selection, as well, having that noted in the Codex is not easily found but it’s found on the Static Front page codex page that says:

“Create a Blog Page: If choosing to add a blog, choose Add New Page again.” found here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_a_Static_Front_Page

By the way, you do know the Preference theme has the same option to use a right or left sidebar layout for the blog? If not, go to your theme page and click on Customize, or go to the main dashboard home, click on Customize Your Site button. Then on the Basic Settings tab, you will find your option for this. If you need something different that isn’t in the theme, then it means coding a new custom layout.

Debugging is generally done from the config file in WordPress which you have to change from False to True.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Debugging_in_WordPress

[Valerie Mallder]

No, actually I totally forgot that I had that option. Thanks for the reminder. I must have known about that option earlier though when I went through all the options to set them the way I wanted them a few weeks ago when I purchased the theme, because I do have it set to use the left sidebar. (Any chance you could add a third option for left and right sidebars?)

Ok, so now I know that WordPress ignores my page template selection, and I had forgotten that I set the blog page to have a left sidebar. So now I know the blog page is working exactly the way it is supposed to. But, there is one more thing that doesn’t look right.

The contents of the blog right sidebar is being shown on the left side of the page. I provided a screen shot of the widgets I have in the blog left and right sidebars. The top widget in both sidebars is a text widget that just says whether it is in the left or right sidebar. And the right sidebar text is showing up on the left side of the screen.

I’m so sorry for this being such a long saga :0 I really do appreciate your help.
SidebarContents.jpg
BasicSettings.jpg

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[Valerie Mallder]

I don’t know if this is related to the right sidebar thing, but here’s a screenshot that shows that the “div.row” extends off the left side of the page. It happens on every page. I first ran into this with the Preference-Lite theme and it made it a little tricky to write css code to do some of the things I was trying to. I haven’t made many css changes since I bought the pro version, so it hasn’t been an issue for me. But I thought you would like to know.

Val
RowOffLeftSideOfPage.jpg

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[Sushil Adhikari]

This is the sign I need a vacation….totally my fault as I could have sworn I fixed this but it looks like I have another update coming for Preference. In the mean time, you can edit your theme file (in the parent theme) called index.php around line 26 looks like this:

Make blogleft as left and this corrects the issue of the right sidebar items showing in the left.

[Sushil Adhikari]

The overlap outside the main containers…It’s designed that way as part of the Twitter’s Bootstrap framework for responsive structure. Anything that is bootstrap related such as classes:

.container
.container-fluid
.row
.row-fluid
.spanx (where the x is a span of columns like .span4)

…you don’t want to modify any of the core attributes of these because you will run into a whole pile of problems. :silly:

[Valerie Mallder]

Ok, I will do this tonight when I get home from work.

But, I thought the “blogleft” identifier was used for left sidebar on blog pages and the “left” identifier was used for left side bar on regular pages. If that is not the case, then, what is the difference between the two and how are they intended to be used? Since I’m dealing with a blog page (“post_type=’post'” or a custom post type), rather than a regular page (“post_type=’page'”), I’m a little bit confused now.

[Sushil Adhikari]

blogleft was a typo of mine and references the sidebar file named: sidebar-left.php so the blogleft was incorrect on my part.

It can get confusing, especially when putting these themes together but Preference also falls under an older method of coding that I did and somethings might not seem overly clear. As I release new themes, I’m constantly improving on how things are done. One of the reasons why I completely rebuilt my Celestial theme from the ground up and released it as Celestial Reloaded.

Anyway, the blogleft being corrected will now show your left widgets in the left side instead of the right sidebar widgets.

[Valerie Mallder]

Thanks very much for all your help today. I really appreciate it!

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