Set up custom header, footer or sidebar for different category posts – WordPress

Have you bored with same layout for all posts in your WordPress blog / CMS?

We choose WordPress as our platform because & its community offer thousands of awesome hacks & tips to make it as unique by customization.

So today, we are going to apply a simple hack to set up custom header, footer or sidebar for our blog posts. Instead of setting up custom layout for each & every posts, we choose category to set up custom header, footer or sidebar.

Before further reading, we need basic knowledge to create custom template file in WordPress. If so, first we want to open index.php file in our child theme folder.

When we open index.php file, we can find function calls like get_header(),get_footer() and get_sidebar() etc.

When we call get_header() function, it includes the header.php template file from our current theme’s directory. If a name is specified then a specialized header header-{name}.php will be included.

Now we are going to use this point to includes custom header in our index.php file.

In our index.php file, just replace get_header() header code with the below code snippet.

<?php if (is_category('Blogging')) {
	get_header('blogging');
} else {
	get_header();
} ?>

I think you can easily catch the logic behind this snippet. It says that, if current category is Blogging, include a custom header template file with the name header-blogging.php instead of normal header template file header.php.

Else utilize our theme’s default header template file header.php.

We can use this same logic in footer & sidebar.

For custom footer, replace get_footer() line with below snippet. We need footer-blogging.php template file in our theme directory.

<?php if (is_category('Blogging')) {
	get_footer('blogging');
} else {
	get_footer();
} ?>

For custom sidebar, replace get_sidebar() line with below snippet. We need sidebar-blogging.php template file in our theme directory.

<?php if (is_category('Blogging')) {
	get_sidebar('blogging');
} else {
	get_sidebar();
} ?>

Try this hack and make your site layout more impressive. If we have a little bit of creativity & basic knowledge to code, the WordPress is always amazing.

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This article was published on May 23, 2014

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