Twenty Fourteen: how do they populate by default the sidebar?

Question

My question is pretty similar to this one:

How can I insert default widgets when my theme is activated (similar to what twenty eleven does)?

Except that it's for Twenty Fourteen. I'm trying to use it as a base for my own theme, and I don't see where in the code it's populating the default widgets in the main sidebar: Search Box, recent entries, recent comments, etc.

In my linked question, the answer turned out to be that they were hardcoded in sidebar.php, but in Twenty Fourteen, as far as I can tell, it's not hardcoded there, nor it's defined in functions.php, when the sidebar is initialized (in twentyfourteen_widgets_init()). So how did they do it?

Answer 1

In Twenty Fourteen, when you first activate the theme without any changes made to the theme, the widgets that appear there on the sidebar are from the dashboard. You can remove them from Appearance > Widgets and you'll see Search, Recent Posts, Recent Comments etc. in the meta-box "Primary Sidebar".

If you want to see the code for the primary sidebar, it's in the sidebar.php file and looks like this:

<?php if ( is_active_sidebar( 'sidebar-1' ) ) : ?>
<div id="primary-sidebar" class="primary-sidebar widget-area" role="complementary">
    <?php dynamic_sidebar( 'sidebar-1' ); ?>
</div><!-- #primary-sidebar -->
<?php endif; ?>

Also if you're just curious how WordPress sets up default widgets (in case I misunderstood your question), WordPress does this in a core file in wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php.

Here you'll find the code that sets up the default widgets on a fresh install of WordPress with a theme. It should look like this on line 234ish:

// Set up default widgets for default theme.
update_option( 'widget_search', array ( 2 => array ( 'title' => '' ), '_multiwidget' => 1 ) );
update_option( 'widget_recent-posts', array ( 2 => array ( 'title' => '', 'number' => 5 ), '_multiwidget' => 1 ) );
update_option( 'widget_recent-comments', array ( 2 => array ( 'title' => '', 'number' => 5 ), '_multiwidget' => 1 ) );
update_option( 'widget_archives', array ( 2 => array ( 'title' => '', 'count' => 0, 'dropdown' => 0 ), '_multiwidget' => 1 ) );
update_option( 'widget_categories', array ( 2 => array ( 'title' => '', 'count' => 0, 'hierarchical' => 0, 'dropdown' => 0 ), '_multiwidget' => 1 ) );
update_option( 'widget_meta', array ( 2 => array ( 'title' => '' ), '_multiwidget' => 1 ) );
update_option( 'sidebars_widgets', array ( 'wp_inactive_widgets' => array (), 'sidebar-1' => array ( 0 => 'search-2', 1 => 'recent-posts-2', 2 => 'recent-comments-2', 3 => 'archives-2', 4 => 'categories-2', 5 => 'meta-2', ), 'array_version' => 3 ) );

Hope that helps. :-)