Sidebar Display Problem

I don’t have a great deal to do last night so I viewed my about and link pages. I was distressed, disappointed that my sidebar for pages (about, link, my-blog, inspirational, archives, categories) doesn’t display precisely as it should. Parts of the sidebar were below the posts (content) making the footer goes out of its position as well. At first I thought it was only because of my slow connection, but after refreshing twice, thrice, I was convinced something went wrong. I don’t know how this sidebar display problem started, but when I first uploaded this theme, months ago, it was working fine.

When I added widgets such as mybloglog and blogcatalog, I didn’t bother to check how it displays on other pages; I was more concerned on the homepage look where all the widgets are located. Since the sidebar displays appropriately in the homepage, I thought the other pages were also properly displayed. Little did I know that my sidebar in other pages were broken. It also shows some widgets meant only for the homepage.

I immediately opened my themes folder and looked for sidebar.php. I am using this sidebar file for my homepage (index.php) and other pages. I am just using the <?php if (is_page()) { ?> and <?php if (is_home()) { ?> so the look would be different in other pages. Checking on the codes, I noticed that some of the if statements are in the wrong places. Ha!Ha! Had I viewed at least one of my other pages before, I would have known this problem earlier.

I assessed the codes and made necessary modification. I then viewed the changes through my local wordpress install. Everything went smoothly again. It’s back to its previous state, so I uploaded the files to my server. I tested my pages again online a few times to make sure everything’s in the right position. And it is!

I failed to notice the erroneous sidebar display before for my other pages because when I visit my site I only check the homepage and the posts (located in single.php). I had no problem with my single.php file since it uses different sidebar file.

Lessons I learned from this? One, double check your codes. Second, always test all the pages that will be affected by the file you modified.