How do I get rid of / disable the sidebar in Wordpress? Templates, of course.

Posted September 25, 2007

This was the question I was grappling with yesterday. Since the site is database driven, how do you make one specific page act differently than the rest? I needed the whole width real estate on the church’s blog for a calendar, but I wanted the sidebar on every other page, just not that one.

Well, in most templating systems, you have different templates you apply to different pages. It just seemed to be downplayed when you are considering using Word Press as your CMS.

I happened to stumble across this option when searching for a solution. There is a drop down menu when you create a new page called “Page Template” that has a list of available templates. But how do you add your own to that list?

Well, you create a page in your theme, name it what you want, and include this comment designation at the top, inside PHP tags, so that Wordpress parses it and knows that it should be used as a page template;

/*
Template Name: (Name)
*/

Where (Name) is the name you enter that you want to use when choosing it as your option. Works like a charm. You may have to change some of your CSS to make the new page work if you have a sidebar in your other templates, but other than that it’s pretty simple.