Lab: Super Sidebars

We can’t figure out how to make LifterLMS Sidebars work with every theme out there. The difficulty is that we do not know what sidebar every theme considers to be the primary sidebar. We’ve tried guessing but there’s no way to know.

With this lab you can, through a small amount of trial and error, hopefully get your theme displaying LifterLMS sidebars on courses and lessons with relative ease.

Super Sidebars is available as a Lab within the free LifterLMS Labs addon.

To install Super Sidebars:

1. Install LifterLMS Labs by following the instructions here.
2. Navigate to the Labs setting screen at LifterLMS -> Labs
3. Enable Super Sidebars by clicking the Enable button

Follow these foolproof steps to get LifterLMS Sidebars working with your theme

Setup

1. Add a text widget to your Course Sidebar and another to your lesson sidebar. Add some text to each widget so that you can differentiate the two sidebars. We recommend  add “course” in the course sidebar and “lesson” in the lesson sidebar.
2. Open two new tabs, in one tab open a LifterLMS Course and in the other open a LifterLMS Lesson.
3. If the text you entered into the course sidebar (and the lesson sidebar) don’t display you need to proceed to the next set of steps. If the correct sidebars show in the correct places your theme is already compatible and you don’t need to do anything. Dismiss the message on the admin panel and carry on happily!

Configuration

1. Enable the Super Sidebars Lab from LifterLMS -> Labs
2. Click Configure
3. On this screen you’ll see a dropdown menu which will display all the sidebars registered by your theme and plugins other than LifterLMS.

Testing Sidebars

We don’t know which sidebar your theme considers the primary sidebar (and we can’t always trust the titles) so we are going to test them one by one until the sidebars from the previous steps display the correct widgets.

1. Select the first sidebar and click “Save”
2. Refresh your course tab and see if the course widget displays
3. If it does check the lesson tab as well
4. If both of these display the correct widgets you’ve found the sidebar. Dismiss the sidebar message on the admin panel and carry on happily! Otherwise choose the next sidebar in the list and repeat steps 2-4 until the correct widgets display.

First: We’re sorry. We did not mean to waste your time.

Second, this might not work for every theme. We have found a handful of themes that just wont work with our sidebars and in these scenarios you’ll have to contact your theme developer to get them working. Again, sorry…