Display a specific dynamic sidebar widgets on a specific page

I have had a wordpress site handed off to me halfway through completion. It’s been at least a year since I last used wordpress and there are a lot of things I’m finding different. The way I am used to displaying different content on different pages is to create page templates for each page that needs unique content.

I am trying to display a different sidebar on one particular page than on the rest of the site. What I would have done a year ago is make a page template for this page and make a new sidebar file and then include the sidebar file in the page template. I’ve found that this doesn’t work. The main culprits I can see are loop.php & loop-page.php, which were non-existent in the stripped down theme that I would typically use when building a site long ago. However, it appears that whoever had their hands on this thing before me has copied the ‘twenty ten’ theme and made changes to it under a new name.

I’ve registered a new dynamic sidebar in the theme’s functions.php and I can see it in the Widgets section of the Dashboard and add widgets to it.

I can’t for the love of god get it to display on the page I want it to though. I’ve tried the following:

1.) Given the page a custom template template_news.php and placed the following where the sidebar should be called:

include ('sidebar-news.php');

The sidebar-news.php filed containing code I copied from sidebar.php with the “News” sidebar id that I listed in functions.php:

<?php if ( is_active_sidebar( 'sidebar-news' ) ) : ?>

<div id="secondary" class="widget-area" role="complementary">
    <ul class="xoxo">
        <?php dynamic_sidebar( 'sidebar-news' ); ?>
    </ul>
</div>

<?php endif; ?>

The page template is applied to the correct page.

2.) Gone into page.php and changed:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

to:

<?php 

if(is_page('18')) {
   include ('sidebar-news.php');
}
else {              
   get_sidebar(); 
} ?>

I’ve also checked several times to make sure the page ID is correct and tried using the slug name instead but to no avail.

3.) Tried the previous in loop-page.php

4.) Placed the following conditional statement in sidebar.php:

<?php
if ( is_active_sidebar( 'sidebar-news' ) && is_page('18') ) : ?>
    <div id="sidebarnews" class="widget-area" role="complementary">
    <ul class="xoxo">
    <?php dynamic_sidebar( 'sidebar-news' ); ?>
    </ul>
    </div>
<?php endif; ?>

Also after doing some research and finding out that the proper way to extend or change the functionality of a theme is to create a child theme, I attempted to do that, but it caused some things to break that I don’t have the time to try and fix.

I’ve found that the default ‘sidebar.php` is being called and displayed on the page, however, even though my conditional statement with the page ID is present, it’s not displaying the custom sidebar widgets.

I also cannot seem to find how the default sidebar is being called on the page because removing get_sidebar(); altogether on my custom template template_news.php , page.php , or loop-page.php doesn’t seem to do anything.

Please can someone let me in on how to add this sidebar to the page.