Adding a header widget in your Thematic child-theme

I’ve been building lots of wordpress sites lately and have been loving the thematic framework. I install the theme and then make my edits in a custom child theme. I’ve begun seeing a few things I end up doing in nearly every site and I wanted to share them because finding out exactly how to do it was a bit like finding a needle in a haystack.

The first one I’ll share is related to creating an extra widget area. I know thematic already has a ton of widget areas. I needed a spot in the header to easily update and add elements. It’s a place that commonly holds links, search boxes, phone numbers etc, and normally it’s ok hard coding that into the theme. But what about when it changes? I always try to empower my clients with the option of making tweaks like this on their own. I have found that it keeps them happy, as they don’t get billed or have to wait for me, and it keeps me happy, since that’s really not what I want to spend my time doing. I try to make my sites the kind that I need to do the heavy lifting and some instruction at launch, but then the client is in control and can maintain the site. Of course I explain that if they break it and I have to come in to fix it, then those are billable hours, anyways… that’s another post for another day. I wanted to give the header area (normally to the right of the logo but above the navigation) a widget area. It turns out that it is really a simple few lines of code put into the child-themes functions.php file to do it!

[cc lang=”php”]
// Add Widget area in header
function add_header_aside($content) {
$content[‘Header Aside’] = array(
‘args’ => array (
‘name’ => ‘Header Aside’,
‘id’ => ‘header-aside’,
‘before_widget’ => thematic_before_widget(),
‘after_widget’ => thematic_after_widget(),
‘before_title’ => thematic_before_title(),
‘after_title’ => thematic_after_title(),
),
‘action_hook’ => ‘thematic_header’,
‘function’ => ‘thematic_header_aside’,
‘priority’ => 0,
);
return $content;
}
add_filter(‘thematic_widgetized_areas’, ‘add_header_aside’);

// And this is our new function that displays the widgetized area
function thematic_header_aside() {
if (is_sidebar_active(‘header-aside’)) {
echo thematic_before_widget_area(‘header-aside’);
dynamic_sidebar(‘header-aside’);
echo thematic_after_widget_area(‘header-aside’);
}
}
[/cc]

I know I got this code from someone in some forum somewhere, but it was a long search, and I couldn’t find it again when I looked, so whoever you are, thanks! I usually end up putting a search widget in the header and a phone number or other contact links or rss links and it’s become pretty standard in my toolkit. Hope it helps!