[BUG] Documentation: lack of sufficient detail on how to manage Sidebars

[jjsanderson]

Is your question related to a problem? Please describe.
I'm trying to recreate the category pages featured in the Benenson demo site. Specifically:

• Header image
• (with descriptive text, which isn't showcased in the demo site but Benenson does support via the category description field)
• Sidebar with pretty category list

However, the Widgets item doesn't appear in my Wordpress sidebar.

Is the demo site using a custom template for the category, or am I missing something? If the latter, this might be a documentation bug?

[jaymcp]

Hi @jjsanderson

Due to Gutenberg not yet supporting blocks within Widget Areas or Sidebars (although they're on the roadmap), we had to implement this in a slightly unusual manner.

There should be a custom post type called Sidebars. Any posts created of that type become available to be chosen as a Sidebar in Theme Settings. There are options for Pages, Archives, and a default.

On the Benenson demo site, we only have a default sidebar. This contains a single Category List block (note that the title of the post will not output anywhere, and is only used for labelling purposes).

Our hope is that, once Gutenberg Phase 2 is complete, we can programatically migrate to Gutenberg Widget Areas for this in a future release.

In this scenario, I think a lack of sufficient documentation is definitely a concern. I will convert this to a bug report.

I hope this answers your question, but please do let me know if you'd like any further detail.

Thanks for your continued contributions!
Jon

[jjsanderson]

Aaaah, gotcha. I should have spotted the CPT in the sidebar - I'm so used to staring at a site that has a stupid number of custom types, I'm rather enjoying how sparse this setup looks. Thanks for pointing me there, now it's easy to achieve most of what I want. Great.

Idiot question: how have you added what I take to be the Header block to the category pages? eg. https://benenson.co/category/uncategorized/. Is there a cunning way of doing that without overriding the individual category templates? I've not yet managed to set up a child theme in Benenson, so everything's stock at the moment…

[jaymcp]

I'm glad to hear you're enjoying it. :)

The Header block shown on that page is actually the one from the first post in that category, rather than one attached to the archive itself.

Have you attempted to set up a child theme and had issues, or have you simply not done so? I can attempt to assist if it's the former.

[jjsanderson]

Aaaah… huh. The first-post featured image-as-category-header isn't showing up for me, though.

Re: child theme: I tried and failed, but that may have been before I set up an older Node and got the main theme working from master. Will explore, if and when I have chance – and thanks for the offer of help, it may well be needed!

[jaymcp]

Hmm, that's odd. I'll see if I can figure it out on my local install and will get back to you when I can (currently travelling, so am limited in what i can do).

Ah. Then it looks as though I have some work to do on the child theme, too! If you do get a chance to try it again, I'd be grateful if you'd let me know whether it works now that you're using a compatible node version. Could be that I need to upgrade the build system on there, too.

Many thanks!

[jjsanderson]

Very late to follow up, but: I ran out of time to get set up with a child theme, sorry, but did manage to successfully launch my site on Benenson: Nature's Raincoats. It's very nearly stock v1.1. There are a few snags, but it's working more than well enough for now, and my client is happy.

Huge thanks for the theme, and for making it usable by all.

[jaymcp]

Hi @jjsanderson

Thanks so much for your feedback; I'm really happy to hear that the theme is working well for you. The site looks great! 😃

If there aren't existing issues open for the snags you've encountered, please feel free to open new ones if you have time; I'm hoping to spend more time on Benenson, so may be able to include tweaks/fixes in a future release

Best
Jon