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On Twenty Eleven or on its child themes the default template for new pages is a template with no sidebar. I don't know why this is like this; it seems to me that the designers of Wordpress are still not thinking about CMS functionality in some places.

For example the most obvious place to put a menu in a CMS is the sidebar. But with Twenty Eleven the only way to show a menu in all pages is to explicitly set all the pages to "sidebar template". I would think it's a design bug, as the only solution so far is to tell everyone to "don't forget to set the new pages to "sidebar template"".

I'm sure there must be a single line in functions.php which changes the default action but I don't know what that line is. Could you tell me what should I write in functions.php to set all new pages to "sidebar template" when using Twenty Eleven?

I'm sure that it has been asked before but I really couldn't find it anywhere using the search function.

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just add <?php get_sidebar(); ?> to page.php in your child theme and all pages will have a sidebar. look at sidebar-page.php to see where to place it.

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  • OK, but then I am modifying page.php. Isn't there a way to keep it minimalistic for the child theme, thus preserving all future updates to page.php?
    – hyperknot
    Oct 10, 2011 at 16:29
  • @zsero - you can hook save_post and add post meta with key _wp_page_template and sidebar-page.php as value. or I suppose you can add some javascript to the post edit screen that auto-selects a template.
    – Milo
    Oct 10, 2011 at 16:52
  • This will brake the site's design unless you play around with the CSS and the position of the article.
    – jnns
    Mar 6, 2012 at 10:13

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