WordPress: Sidebar not showing up on older themes with WordPress 2.9+

Revised 4/28/2010 with a new fix.

I noticed with the latest version of WordPress, an older template may not display the sidebar correctly. If you look at the source code, you notice a lot of HTML code is missing in the sidebar div. The easiest fix I found was to update the “sidebar.php” file in the template.

To get your old theme working, you will need to edit sidebar.php and have the following:

<div id="sidebar">
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('sidebar') ) : ?>
  <?php endif; // end of sidebar1 ?>
</div>

This must exist somewhere within your sidebar.php. Older themes don’t have a sidebar div and thus would break. I usually place this code after the first “<div id=”content-right”>” section.