Unregistering a Sidebar in Child Theme

Question

I'm working with a handy responsive theme framework (Reverie) and I'm developing my own theme the right way using a Child theme. The Parent theme calls a sidebar called with an ID of 'Footer' and applies some basic styles to it. I want to adjust this in my child theme, so I was looking at perhaps filtering it but in the end I decided it'd probably be easiest to unregister the sidebar and re-register a new one with the proper classes in childtheme's functions.php.

Here's the code from the parent theme which declares the sidebar

$sidebars = array('Footer');
foreach ($sidebars as $sidebar) {
    register_sidebar(array('name'=> $sidebar,
        'id' => 'Footer',
        'before_widget' => '<div class="large-3 columns"><article id="%1$s"    class="panel widget %2$s">',
        'after_widget' => '</article></div>',
        'before_title' => '<h4>',
        'after_title' => '</h4>'
    ));
}

Yet, I'm not able to de-register the sidebar. I've attempted it, with the code below, but without any luck..

// Unregisters Reverie footer sidebar
 function remove_footer(){
    unregister_sidebar( 'Footer' );
}
add_action ('widgets_init, remove_footer', 11);

// Registers new footer array with proper classes

$sidebars = array('Childfeet');
foreach ($sidebars as $sidebar) {
    register_sidebar(array('name'=> $sidebar,
        'id' => 'Childfeet',
        'before_widget' => '<div class="small-12 medium-6 large-3 columns"><article id="%1$s" class="panel widget %2$s">',
        'after_widget' => '</article></div>',
        'before_title' => '<h4>',
        'after_title' => '</h4>'
    ));
}

My new sidebar with proper classes is of course created, but it seems like my remove_footer() does not do it's job. Any ideas?

I have checked out all the other 'unregistering sidebar' posts here in the forums, but these all contain errors in functions which I can't see in my code.

Thanks a bunch for your time!

Answer 1

It should be possible to use the after_setup_theme hook to unregister the sidebar you don't want like this:

function go_away_extra_sidebar(){
    unregister_sidebar( 'Footer' );
}

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'go_away_extra_sidebar' );

Happy Coding,

Kuchenundkakao

Answer 2

Thanks for your help fellas! The after_setup_theme() function was a new one for me which is probably going to be very helpful down the line. Unfortunately my error was something simpler. When I called the unregister_sidebar function..

add_action ('widgets_init, remove_footer', 11);

I was missing the proper quotes around each function. It should read.

add_action ('widgets_init', 'remove_footer', 11); 

It removes the Footer sidebar as expected. :-(

Thank you for helping me track it down!