How do I get rid of / disable the sidebar in WordPress? Templates, of course.

This was the question I was grappling with yesterday. Since the site is database driven, how do you make one specific page act differently than the rest? I needed the whole width real estate on the church’s blog for a calendar, but I wanted the sidebar on every other page, just not that one.

Well, in most templating systems, you have different templates you apply to different pages. It just seemed to be downplayed when you are considering using Word Press as your CMS.

I happened to stumble across this option when searching for a solution. To assign a page a different template than the default, you look to the drop down menu called “Page Template” under Attributes that has a list of available templates. But how do you add templates to that list?

Well, you create a new file in your theme folder, name the file what you want, and include this comment designation at the top, inside PHP tags, so that WordPress parses it and knows that it should be used as a page template. (You may want to use the existing page template as a start);

/*
Template Name: (Name)
*/

Where (Name) is the name you enter that you want to use when choosing it as your option. Works like a charm. You may have to change some of your CSS to make the new page work if you have a sidebar in your other templates, but other than that it’s pretty simple. If you ftp your file to the server and you don’t see the new template in the menu, then check your PHP code formatting, WordPress obviously isn’t seeing it as a template file.

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