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Why no sidebar on wordpress single posts in twentyeleven?

By January 2, 2012Wordpress Tinkering

I’m using the default wordpress theme, twentyeleven, which I think is great. It’s clean and efficient and I’m very happy. I have a child theme just to add my own header and some styling, but otherwise it’s pretty stock. However, I just realized today that my single posts don’t have a sidebar! There is apparently a very good reason for this, explained in this article:

The workings of Twenty Eleven / Duster

The main point is that there is this cool new feature called Showcase, with which you can change the front page of your blog to a mixture of static and dynamic content with featured posts, rather than just the most recent posts. BUT I am not currently using the Showcase feature and it’s important to me that my readers have quick access to the rest of my blog when entering through a single post. SO, I did some digging and here’s what I found:

Chris Aprea over at Future Web came up with a great little solution. Just remove the single post filter in your child theme’s functions file. Then add a call to the sidebar in your single.php file and voila! Welcome back sidebar! Full instructions here.

Chris commented out the previous/next buttons, but I just moved them to the bottom before the comments. Then I reformatted them in my child styles.css file:

nav-single css

So that’s it! Pretty simple really. I’ll let you know if and when I decide that I MUST use Showcase. Will it be worth giving up the sidebar? I’m just not sure.

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