Using Child Themes with Artisteer sidebar templates.

I have been using artisteer to create the basic templates for some of my sites. With the release of WordPress 3.0 came many features. One that i like and have been learning to use is Child Themes. These are great for artisteer themes as i can make many changes to the child theme and if i update the parent theme the childs changes are carried over automatically. for more info on this check out the WP Codex or one of the many tutorials available on google. The problem with this is that artisteers templates need a quick change to make them compatible.

I found this problem when trying to use sidebar1.php in my child theme to replace the parents sidebar. The problem lies in how the artisteer template calls the sidebars. It uses the WP "TEMPLATEPATH" to load the php scripts. When using a child theme this creates a problem as TEMPLATEPATH points to the parent themes directory. To get sidebars to load from the current theme(child theme if selected) you need to search for TEMPLATEPATH in all your parent template files and replace it with STYLESHEETPATH which points to the directory of the current themes CSS stylesheet.

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