Question

I’m creating a child theme for twentyeleven. I want to remove all the sidebars specified by default, and add one of my own. In the twentyeleven themes functions.php is this:

<?php
// etc etc etc
function twentyeleven_widgets_init() {

    register_widget( 'Twenty_Eleven_Ephemera_Widget' );

    register_sidebar( array(
        'name' => __( 'Main Sidebar', 'twentyeleven' ),
        'id' => 'sidebar-1',
        'before_widget' => '<aside id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
        'after_widget' => "</aside>",
        'before_title' => '<h3 class="widget-title">',
        'after_title' => '</h3>',
    ) );

    // etc. 4 others registered too...
}
add_action( 'widgets_init', 'twentyeleven_widgets_init' );

// etc etc etc
?>

Now I realise that if I just comment out the add action, this will remove them all. I dont want to do this thought because when the parent theme is updated they will re-appear.

I’ve attempted to do this in the child-theme’s functions.php without success:

<?php
// etc etc etc

function unregister_old_sidebars() {
    unregister_sidebar('sidebar-1');
    //and i've tried unregister_sidebar('Main Sidebar');
}
add_action( 'widgets_init', 'unregister_old_sidebars' );

// etc etc etc
?>

Codex says to use unregister_sidebar($id) where $id is “The ID of the sidebar when it was added”. So… I guess it’s the ‘widgets_init’ action that’s wrong? Do the child theme functions not run AFTER the parent functions?

Help! 😀
Ben

Answer 1

Ok I’m an idiot. Answered my own question by actually READING the docs (http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/unregister_sidebar):
“In the example, note that we assign a priority of 11 when registering the widgets_init hook. This is because a child theme’s functions.php file is called before the parent theme’s, which means that our call to unregister_sidebar() would accomplish nothing since the sidebar has not yet been registered.”