Building a Stacks Sidebar

Since Stacks doesn’t work with the native RW sidebar, is there any simple way to build a Stacks sidebar?

Simplest way is to use a standard two column stack and adjust the width of the columns to create a main content area and a ‘sidebar’ content area. If your chosen theme has a sidebar, remember to turn it off in Master Styles.

For more control, have a look at BWD’s BluePrint stacks (https://www.bigwhiteduck.com/stacks/blueprint/) and remember to make a donation if you find them useful.

Rob

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Here’s another idea; use the newly released Appender stack to move one or more stacks into your theme sidebar:

I have uploaded a sample RapidWeaver 8 project file here. This uses the old Cameo theme (because it has a prominent sidebar box), but in the real world you’d probably be using a newer, mobile responsive theme.

  1. Set the Appender target to #myCustomSidebar in the stack settings.
  2. Type <div id="myCustomSidebar"></div> into your sidebar.

Appender will move whatever you place inside of itself to the new location within your sidebar. Continue to use your theme sidebar in the normal way.

With this solution, there is no requirement to start building and testing new page layouts. It’ll work with your existing theme sidebar (including any sidebar style settings your theme has) and all basic stack types.

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Hi Will,

I must apologize for not getting back to you sooner. Thank you so, so much for letting me know about the Appender stack. It really works GREAT! I will be using it throughout my site with three different sidebars that each include a Partial. The site is FrenchCaribbean.com.

There is just one little mystery that has me stumped. I just added the Appender sidebars to all of the Guadeloupe pages and will be doing the other islands soon. The images and Adsense ads in the Partials all work perfectly. However, there is one paragraph of text (“French Caribbean International. . .”) near the bottom of the sidebars that keeps picking up the link from the top image in the sidebar. This is very strange since it is a simple text stack and contains no link at all. Here’s an example: https://frenchcaribbean.com/Guadeloupe/Introduction/

Any thoughts on what is causing this glitch and how to fix it?

Thanks again,

Gerald

Hi Rob,

I apologize for taking so long to get back to you. Thank you so much for your suggestion. Since my site was nearly complete except for the sidebar content, I am working with Will Woodgate’s new Appender stack. So far, it’s working great. For the next site I build, I’ll try your two column solution.

Thanks again,

Gerald

Hi Gerald,

You have lots of HTML errors in the page. Things like:

  • <br></br>
  • <a font-weight:bold href="/privacy-policy">

I suspect the problem is because you have a mismatch of opening and closing tags somewhere. Therefore your link is getting applied to more than the desired items.

If you send the RW project file and third party stacks to me, I’ll try to fix your code.

It would also be a good idea to give all your images (like the logo image) web safe file names. Currently your images contain spaces and this could definitely cause breakage or a failure for them to display. It is always wise to replace spaces in any file names with with either hyphens or underscores.

-Will.

Hi Will,

Thank you so much for your note, your helpful suggestions and your kind offer to help out. I will put the project file and third party stacks into Dropbox for you. Please let me know the best email address to use for you.

Gerald

Hi Gerald,

My will dot woodgate at gmail dot com email address is linked to a Dropbox account. You can share it to that.

Please provide a reply email address in your Dropbox comment, so I can reply with any additional info.

-Will.

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