[Resolved] Custom page or additional widgets?

[Joni]

I am converting a site from Genesis Streamline Pro to GP. The front page has three widgets on the front page. Using a child theme, I was able to get the widgets to appear in the widget area, but not on a custom page (front-page.php). Nor could I get them to appear when adding similar code to a GP hook.

Any thoughts on how to achieve this with widgets? The site will be for my civic club so the home page widgets (featured pages) needs to be flexible. Otherwise, I’d just hard code it.

I was hopeful that GP would honor the front-page.php template or any other kind of custom page template, but it doesn’t appear that it does.

[Joni]

My workarounds include the following:

A. Different sidebar for pages versus posts
I set the blog posts to use the left sidebar and the pages to use the right sidebar. I am not happy about it but I see no other way, besides a bulky plugin, to do this.

Feature Request for the future perhaps?

B. Widgetized home page.
I used a plugin called Featured Page Widget on the right sidebar to create the swappable featured pages they are going to need. I would prefer the customary three box home page widget but we don’t always get what we want. (But if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need!)

Site testbed is here:
http://wordpress.mytestbed.com

Current site using Genesis Streamline Pro is here:
https://idylwood.org

I think I like the new design better.

[Tom]

Hi Joni,

If you registered the widget areas, you still need to display them on the page. You could do that using front-page.php (GP honors all core WP functionality), or you could use hooks. The function to display a widget area can be found here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/dynamic_sidebar

a) This kind of functionality is actually much better suited in a plugin. There’s a handful of great ones – I use this one here on this site: https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/content-aware-sidebars/

Let me know if you need more info 🙂

[Joni]

I created front-page.php but it didn’t seem to work. However, I found a workaround that I (and the board) like so we will see how it goes. I had a lot of plugins going with the Genesis-based site (34). Using GP, I was able to trim it down to 28!

I like it so far: https://idylwood.org

[Tom]

Looks great! 🙂

[Author]

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