I’m developing a wordpress plugin that needs to be able to detect whether the currently active theme has widget-capable sidebars, so that it knows whether it can add widgets or not. So, how do I detect whether the current theme is widget-aware?
how do I detect whether a wordpress theme has sidebars
You’ll be glad to hear there’s a couple of variables which WP uses:
$wp_registered_sidebars and $wp_registered_widgets
Then, as per wp-admin/widgets.php:
$sidebars = array_keys($wp_registered_sidebars);
Don’t forget, WordPress does this itself – if there are no widget-read sidebars in a theme, the widgets.php page tells you so (if you look at wp-admin/widgets.php in the core, you’ll see how, but those 2 variables are the basis of it)
There is no good way without installing the theme and trying it to determine if the sidebars and widgets REALLY work. I keep a spare domain just for testing themes and widgets in WordPress. WordPress is a wonderful tool (I run at least a dozen domains with it), but some themes are flaky.
Another thing to test is whether the widgets appear correctly when you put them in a specific sidebar. I’ve found several themes that copy the widget data from the left sidebar to the right side bar and visa-versa.
The default sidebars (with no widgets added) are nothing like the side bars that you get when you start moving widgets around.
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