htmlBurger

Hi @knath632,

Do you see the sidebar ID? It is about-sidebar or my-new-sidebar. You can use it in the dynamic_sidebar() and is_active_sidebar() functions, as in the example we’ve posted above.

However we feel you want to dynamically choose a sidebar which to display. If that is the case, you should do the following:

1. Create a container (for example theme options). Example and docs: http://carbonfields.net/docs/containers-theme-options/
2. Add a Sidebar field, named custom_sidebar: http://carbonfields.net/docs/fields-sidebar/
3. Go to the admin and select your sidebar in that field. You can create new ones, if you wish.
4. Use the following code to display that dynamic sidebar (assuming your field is in a Theme Options container and is named custom_sidebar):

<?php $sidebar = carbon_get_theme_option( 'custom_sidebar' ); ?>
<?php if ( is_active_sidebar( $sidebar ) ) : ?>
	<ul class="sidebar">
		<?php dynamic_sidebar( $sidebar ); ?>
	</ul>
<?php endif; ?>

Hope that answers your question.

Howdy @knath632,

Sidebars registered with Carbon Fields’s sidebar manager are registered with a slug version of the provided sidebar name. The slug version is generated by the sanitize_title() built-in WordPress function, which is also used to generate the slugs of the posts/pages.

So for example if your sidebar is called Test Sidebar, its autogenerated slug will be test-sidebar.

In order to render that sidebar in your code, consider the following code:

<?php if ( is_active_sidebar( 'test-sidebar' ) ) : ?>
	<ul class="sidebar">
		<?php dynamic_sidebar( 'test-sidebar' ); ?>
	</ul>
<?php endif; ?>

Please, don’t hesitate to ask if you have any other questions.

Hi Eric,

We’re constantly working on improving the documentation. Such support tickets are helping us in finding out what we need to fix and polish. So thank you 🙂

And good luck with your project 🙂

Hi Eric,

We’re unable to reproduce this issue.

But we really want to help you, so can you please send us a screencast of it, so we can assist you with fixing it?

Thanks in advance.

Howdy @tomwhita,

Sure you can. But it is not the right place to do so.

Due to ww.wp.xz.cn forum’s policy (https://codex.ww.wp.xz.cn/Forum_Welcome) we’re not allowed to discuss any commercial work here, nor to share our company URL.

But we’re sure you can find us and our site by searching for our ww.wp.xz.cn username. Feel free to do so.

Hey @tomwhita,

Are you using the “Post Custom Field” field in Gravity Forms?

If you do, you might want to try the Multi Select field type in that field, as it contains multiple values and probably inserts the data in a serialized array.

If there’s no working way to insert an array of data in a custom field with Gravity Forms, some custom code will probably be necessary to insert that meta after the form submission – Gravity Forms have a lot of hooks available that you can use.

Howdy, @tomwhita,

It appears to be an interesting project 😉 Now to your questions:

I have successfully managed to insert an association value using a gravity form but the association is not shown in the carbon fields UI in the admin. Do you know why this might happen?

This would indicate that the data is not added correctly, and probably isn’t in the expected format. You should refer to our above explanation about how the association field data should be stored in the database.

Also, how do I now retrieve data from an association field in a usable way? For example, I have associated users with the custom post type “Project”. How can I show the display name of the user on my page template?

Let’s say the association field name where you associated users is project_users. Let’s also consider that your project ID is $project_id. In that case, you should use carbon_get_post_meta( $project_id, 'project_users', 'association' ) – this will return an array with the IDs of all selected users. Then you can use the user functions (like get_user_by() to retrieve the user object and information about it.

Hey @tomwhita,

The association field data is serialized like this:

a:3:{i:0;s:12:"post:page:48";i:1;s:12:"post:page:10";i:2;s:11:"post:page:8";}

which eventually unserializes to:

(
    [0] => post:page:48
    [1] => post:page:10
    [2] => post:page:8
)

As listed in the field documentation, an association field can have more than one value, and each value can be a post type, taxonomy term, user or comment. In this example, there are 3 selected items, all of them are pages.

Basically, each value is formed like this:

{type}:{subtype}:{id}

where:

1. {type} is the data type – post, term, user or comment.
2. {subtype} is the data subtype – which is the post_type if using a post, or the taxonomy if using a term, user for users and comment for comments.
3. {id} is the ID of the post, term, user or comment.

So, now to your case. You want to insert a valie with the ID of a project, it would consist of one selected item, a post with post type project. If the project has ID of 123, your entry would look like this:

post:project:123

and in order to insert it so it properly serializes, it has to be an array, like this:

array( 'post:project:123' )

Please, let us know if you have any other questions.

Regarding contribution: any kind of contribution is welcome in the GitHub repos of the project: https://github.com/htmlburger/carbon-fields and the docs: https://github.com/htmlburger/carbon-fields-docs .

In the project repo you could contribute by feature requests, bug fixes, code improvements, and even translations.

In the docs repo you can always suggest ideas for improvement and for including undocumented features. The latest release of the documentation (corresponding to the latest release of Carbon Fields) is always automatically pushed on http://carbonfields.net/

Have fun 😉