How To: Create Custom Page Templates in WordPress Thesis

Using the Thesis Theme with WordPress we recently came across a situation where we needed to hide, or not show, the Multimedia Box and 1st sidebar on a certain page and only show the 2nd sidebar. Learn more about the WordPress Thesis Theme.

I thought we could easily achieve this Thesis design change by using a Thesis hook. We’ve used many hooks in the past so I was hoping a hook would exist for replacing the entire Multimedia Box and/or sidebars in the same manner.  While looking on the Thesis Hook Reference List page (http://diythemes.com/thesis/rtfm/hooks) it seems that currently the only hooks that deal with the items I am wanting to change are “thesis_hook_after_multimedia_box”, “thesis_hook_before_sidebar_1″ and “thesis_hook_after_sidebar_1″ . I didn’t find a “thesis_hook_multimedia_box” hook or a “thesis_hook_sidebar_1″ hook like the “thesis_hook_footer” hook we used to directly replace the footer with what we wanted. Hopefully in the future Thesis will ever support such hooks…

function my_multimedia_box() {
echo “\t\t”, ‘test’, “\n”;
}
remove_action(’thesis_hook_multimedia_box’, ‘thesis_attribution’);
add_action(’thesis_hook_multimedia_box’, ‘my_multimedia_box’);

After more Google searching i found that Chris Pearson from Thesis created a No Sidebars Page Template that comes packaged with Thesis which is similar to what we want to do. I figured I would create our own custom Page Template we could use instead of the No Sidebars one. I opened “no_sidebars.php” located in the theme directory and saw:

/*
Template Name: No Sidebars
*/

thesis_html_framework();

which told me I would have to hack Thesis core files to achieve what I was set out to do. After looking through the Thesis files I found where Chris Pearson has an “if” statement asking if $page_template == ‘no_sidebars.php’. This code is located in your_theme_folder/lib/html/content.php in the thesis_content() function (the first function in content.php). I saw that for the No Sidebars Page Template a class called “no_sidebars” was assigned to the “content_box” div so i added in my own “elseif” statement. The following code shows my end result of the thesis_content function in content.php: (The only code I changed was adding the elseif)

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