[Support request] Adding WooCommerce-only sidebar

[neverything]

Hi, I am using GP Premium with the WooCommerce plugin, and I want to display a WooCommerce-specific sidebar on my Woo archive pages. I would prefer to not use another plugin to filter widgets, or anything like that. (I know this topic has come up a few times here in the support forums, but I went through all the past solutions and can’t seem to get it to work.)

I have the new Woo-only sidebar registered and showing correctly (yay) but the regular right sidebar is also showing above it. I have narrowed the problem down to the first 3 lines below:

// this code seems to have no effect...
if ( function_exists( 'is_woocommerce' ) && is_woocommerce() ) {
	remove_action( 'woocommerce_sidebar', 'woocommerce_get_sidebar', 10 );
}

// this code below works great and adds my Woo sidebar correctly
add_action( 'woocommerce_sidebar', function () {
	get_sidebar( 'woocommerce' );
} );

My theory is that the GP Premium Woo plugin is overriding and doing its own sidebar display. I found the generate_sidebar_layout filter and played with that but no luck. How can I get just my Woo sidebar to show on my Woo is_archive() pages, and not the regular sidebar at all?

Thanks very much,
Eric

p.s. I see so many requests for a WooCommerce-specific sidebar, it would be cool if this was an option in the GP Premium plugin… turn it on and it shows up in widgets, ready to roll.

[David]

Hi there

can you provide a link to the site? You can edit your original post and use the Site URL field which is for admins only.

[Swizzonic AG]

Hi David, this is Eric on a different account – I’ve edited the post above to include the site URL (it is on a staging server) but you’ll need a user account to get in. How can I get you those credentials? Thanks.

[Leo]

You can send it through Account Issue here:
https://generatepress.com/contact/

Make sure to reference the topic URL.

[Swizzonic AG]

Ok! Just sent. Thanks for your support. E

[David]

Hi Eric,

ok just spotted that you’re trying to disable a sidebar that GP doesn’t generate in that first function – that is we don’t have a woocommerce_sidebar. What is being displayed is the GP right-sidebar. This article here has a filter for changing the layout, the first example is for a woocmmerce setup – just need to return no-sidebar.

https://docs.generatepress.com/article/sidebar-layout/

Let me know.

[Swizzonic AG]

Hi David, thank you for this reply, sorry it has taken me a few days to track it down and try it out.

I am not sure I completely understand what you are saying. 🙂

In my functions I register a new sidebar called ‘woocommerce’. How can I hook into GP to tell it to draw this sidebar on the Woo is_archive() page, but not anywhere else?

I tried adapting the code snippet you mentioned, but now, the normal sidebar is showing up on the Blog page (good), and on my Woo page, I get both the normal sidebar (bad) and a weird phantom sidebar with just search and archives (??). I don’t see my custom woocommerce sidebar anywhere, but on my woo page I am swimming in sidebars. 🙂

I just pushed out a new deploy with that changed code snippet. Any chance you can take a peek? And feel free to look at what I did in functions.php. You’ll see where I create the custom woocommerce sidebar in there, too.

Thank you for your help…

best
Eric

[David]

Apologies, think i am having a meltdown lol – this is a lot more complicated then it looks. Have you thought of using a plugin like:

https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/content-aware-sidebars/

[Swizzonic AG]

Hi David, heh, thank you for the reply. I could use a plugin but that seems like major overkill. I can write the code to draw a sidebar, and I can easily limit that to woocommerce archive pages only. The issue is where to hook in with GP. Maybe I can kill the GP Premium plugin that plays with sidebars and that will let me do it. I’ll let ya know what happens….

[Swizzonic AG]

Ultimately it was easier just to override this GP function and put this into my child theme functions.php… But I would strongly recommend you guys add a hook for in here to let the user add their own sidebar easily! 🙂

// override this function
function generate_construct_sidebars() {
	$layout = generate_get_layout();

	// When to show the right sidebar.
	$rs = [ 'right-sidebar', 'both-sidebars', 'both-right', 'both-left' ];

	// When to show the left sidebar.
	$ls = [ 'left-sidebar', 'both-sidebars', 'both-right', 'both-left' ];

	// If left sidebar, show it.
	if ( in_array( $layout, $ls ) ) {
		get_sidebar( 'left' );
	}

	if ( function_exists( 'is_woocommerce' ) && is_woocommerce() && is_archive() ) {
		get_sidebar( 'woocommerce' );
	} elseif ( in_array( $layout, $rs ) ) {
		// If right sidebar, show it.
		get_sidebar();
	}
}

[David]

Hi there, glad you found a solution and thank you for sharing. Nice method.
I believe Tom has something planned in this area.

[Swizzonic AG]

Review ✔ done

[Author]

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