Use Genesis Simple Sidebars with Winning Agent Pro

Less than two weeks since our launch of the new Winning Agent Pro theme for the Genesis Framework and we’re already seeing folks building some great websites with it – real estate sites and non-realty businesses alike!

Of course, buying Winning Agent Pro is the first step to building your site, but it won’t feel like home until you walk through the setup and make it your own through customizations.

Last week I shared how to add a custom site title to Winning Agent Pro to look like the demo. Today I want to show you how to use the Genesis Simple Sidebars with the theme.

First, what is Genesis Simple Sidebars?

Genesis Simple Sidebars is an awesome (and free!) plugin available in the WordPress repository. The plugin allows you to create multiple widget areas and assign them to sidebar locations within the Genesis Framework. In short, it’s a great way to add a custom sidebar on a per post, per page, or per tag/category archive basis.

To use it, you create as many custom sidebars as you need. Next, from whatever post or page you’re on, select the desired sidebar from your sidebars menu, like this:

Cool, huh?

What About the Community Custom Post Type?

If you’ve already started working with Winning Agent Pro, you’ve likely noticed that it includes a custom post type called “Communities,” allowing you to easily create hyper local content and showcase communities on your site’s front page.

You can spruce up your Community pages even more by using custom sidebars to display community-specific listings, info, etc. The possibilities are endless!

But there’s a problem…. The communities in Winning Agent Pro are a custom post type and, by default, custom post types don’t come with an option to select a sidebar. Don’t cry, though. I’ll show you how to make it work.

Genesis Simple Sidebars + the Community Custom Post Type

Before I show you how to add Genesis Simple Sidebars support to a custom post type, I want to make sure you’re comfortable adding some code to your site’s functions.php file. If not, I strongly suggest you run through this post on troubleshooting WordPress for a few pointers on the subject.

Okay, disclaimers are out of the way. Open up your site’s functions.php file in a text editor (I recommend a couple in troubleshooting article).

Copy the code below (minus the first line), scroll to the end of the file and paste. Tip: Click the “view raw” link to get an easier copy/paste.

Don’t forget to save the file!

That’s It!

Were you hoping for something more difficult? I’ll have to disappoint you today! Now that you’ve added post type support for the sidebars plugin, next time you add or edit a community and you’ll see the Sidebar Selection option.

Even though this tutorial is written with the Winning Agent Pro theme, the code snippet above will work on any theme made for the Genesis Framework. All you’d need to change is the name of the custom post type from ‘wap-community’ to whatever the name is of your custom post type.