Add New Dynamic Widgets Area in Header of Your Child Theme with TwentyTwelve Parent

This is a short tutorial on how to add a new dynamic widgets area to a custom header of a child theme with Twenty Twelve parent new WordPress Theme.

Add this code in your child theme‘s functions.php (you already have this file in your child theme, if not, just create one, and add php marks for code block)

//add a widget area in the header
if ( function_exists ('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar( array(
  'name' => __( 'Header Widgets Area', 'twentytwelve' ),
  'id' => 'sidebar-header',
  'description' => __( 'A new header widgets area for my child them' ,  'twentytwelve' ),
  'before_widget' => '<aside id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
  'after_widget' => '</aside>',
  'before_title' => '<h3 class="widget-title">',
  'after_title' => '</h3>',
) );
add_action( 'widgets_init', 'twentytwelve_widgets_init' );

You can see now in your widgets admin page, there is a new widgets area added on top. Let’s make it functional.

Add a new file called sidebar-header.php into your child theme folder root. Insert the following code to the file:

<?php if ( is_active_sidebar( 'sidebar-header' ) ) : ?>
		<div id="headWidgets" role="complementary">
			<?php dynamic_sidebar( 'sidebar-header' ); ?>
		</div>
<?php endif; ?>

Now just call the new dynamic widgets from custom header.php file of your child theme (or add a copy of parent’s file into child theme folder and insert this code where needed)

<?php get_sidebar( 'header' ); ?>

Everything should work as expected now, just write some custom CSS for the new area. Nothing will stop us to add such area also into our custom footer

Related posts:

• Remove ie.css of Parent Twenty Twelve Theme and Add a Copy of it in Your Child Theme