Widget title markup in register_sidebar

Question

How come the markup I specify in the 'before_title' and 'after_title' settings of register_sidebar gets applied to the default text WordPress widget but not one of our custom widgets, when both are in the same sidebar and both have a title in the widget settings?

For example when I set

register_sidebar(
        array(
            'name' => $name,
            'id' => $id,
            'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
            'after_widget' => '</li>',
            'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">XXXXX',
            'after_title' => '</h2>',
        )
    );

the XXXX appears in the text widget's title, but not in any of our custom widgets.

In the widget method of the custom widgets we do stuff like

$title = $instance['title'];
if ( $title ) {
    echo '<h2><span class="text">' . esc_html( $title ) . '</span></h2>';
}

Does this way of rendering the title override any settings you put in register_sidebar?

Answer 1

If that is all of your "title" code, you aren't echoing $before_title and $after_title. Look at how the default text widget, which you reference, does it:

399         function widget( $args, $instance ) {
400                 extract($args);
401                 $title = apply_filters( 'widget_title', empty( $instance['title'] ) ? '' : $instance['title'], $instance, $this->id_base );
402                 $text = apply_filters( 'widget_text', empty( $instance['text'] ) ? '' : $instance['text'], $instance );
403                 echo $before_widget;
404                 if ( !empty( $title ) ) { echo $before_title . $title . $after_title; } ?>
405                         <div class="textwidget"><?php echo !empty( $instance['filter'] ) ? wpautop( $text ) : $text; ?></div>
406                 <?php
407                 echo $after_widget;
408         }

Look at line 404. I don't see the "before" and "after" in your code.