In the bfa forum, “everyman” from wordpressacademy.biz describes how to get Atahualpa to look like Thesis out of the box. He supplies a download of an Atahualpa settings file which does the job and describes how to create the additional widget areas so that you end up with one RHS widget area spanning two sub-columns, just like Thesis. The top spanning widget area can be used for an image rotator or a video etc.
This is based on an the idea of using the Advanced Text Widget to insert code that replaces the Right Sidebar with 3 new areas.
I’ve tried out the settings file and it confused me somewhat. After importing the settings I found I now had 3 additional widget areas in my Widgets panel. Turns out the settings file had code to create these in it.
BUT!!!
The widget areas would not show up in the front end when I put content in them. They seemed to be there, but had not been applied in any of the Atahualpa configurable areas as per the instructions under Add New Widget Areashttp://royhair.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=2342&action=edit. But they did show up as existing in the Add New Widget Areas panel.I got really confused for a while because I followed the instructions to create the widget areas using the Advanced Text Widget plugin and eventually (after changing widget area names) ended up with 6 new widget areas, only 3 of which would work!
So I reset Atahualpa settings to default, disbaled the plugin, imported the settings file, DELETED the 3 new widget areas from the Add New Widget Areas panel, and went back to the original instructions that advocated using the Advanced Text Widget. After enabling this plugin, I went to the Widgets panel and put the following code into the Right Sidebar:
<?php bfa_widget_area('name=My new widget area'); ?>
<?php bfa_widget_area('name=sidebar_widget_area&cells=2&align=9&cellpadding=5&before_widget=<div id="%1$s" class="sidebar-widget %2$s">&after_widget=</div>'); ?>
This essentially seems to do the same job that the Atahualpa settings file did, but for some reason it works whereas the settings file didn’t. I suspect the settings file had been exported AFTER the Advanced Text Widget (ATW) plugin had put the widget areas in place and without the original inclusion of the ATW plugin it didn’t “take”.
You end up with My New Widget Area, Sidbebar Widget area 1 and Sidebar Widget area 2. You can rename these within the ATW widget that you added to the original Right Sidebar widget area.
So it’s working now. If this helps anyone, here is the Atahualpa settings file I used to style the site without the additional widget area stuff. Import this BEFORE enabling the ATW plugin and creating the widget areas with the code.
ata-thesis-like-20110323
The original post on wordpressacademy.biz implied that this Atahualpa method would work with the Thesis Open Hook plugin, but I haven’t tried that yet. It seems unlikely, but you never know.
Tags: atahualpa, thesis
