All Things Anne

If you’re like me and you have multiple WordPress themes, you know how hard it is to have to update every single sidebar to change a link or so on. I have two sidebars, which I edit semi-regularly, so I know how difficult that is! Previously, I’d just link them in every theme to the sidebar files in the default theme, but when I changed my default theme…then what?

I figured there had to be a better way, so I searched my WordPress admin panel, and came across Manage > Files, which somehow I hadn’t been there before! (And I usually poke through every link in my admin panel pretty frequently!) There, I saw the list of recently used files, and the list of common files. Well, I got the bright idea to put my sidebar files in the common files list! So, I opened templates.php (found in wp-admin), and looked until I found something familiar.

<?php $common_files = array('index.php', '.htaccess', 'my-hacks.php' );
$old_files = array('wp-layout.css', 'wp-comments.php', 'wp-comments-popup.php' );

I just added in the names of my files, which I uploaded to my root, and voila! Now, I just have to link all my templates to get the sidebars from my root dir, and I only have one place to change them, no matter what theme! Yay me!

Thanks to Elliot Swan’s Postable to make that code post-friendly!