Eiche fam

With the most recent release of my WordPress theme Cover, I’ve included an enhancement that I’m kind of proud of.

Cover supports a few modules in the Jetpack plugin, but the one I want to highlight is the infinite scrolling functionality.

The basic implementation of infinite scrolling support is simple enough:

add_theme_support( 'infinite-scroll', array(
  /* options */
) );

With infinite scrolling, you’re never going to see the footer. This is a problem if you’ve got widgets in the footer, but fortunately the Jetpack team thought of this. They’re included an optional argument footer_widgets which can tell whether or not a theme has footer widgets. If it does, it’ll switch the type from scroll to click.

Cover doesn’t use footer widgets — all the widgets go inside the overlay — but it does have the option of a footer social media menu. In the event of this menu’s existence, the infinite scrolling support needs to be aware enough to switch the type.

This is where the Jetpack-provided filter infinite_scroll_has_footer_widgets comes in handy. Here is Cover’s implementation:

function cover_infinite_scroll_has_footer_widgets( $has_widgets ) {
  $has_widgets = false;
  if ( has_nav_menu( 'social_footer' ) ) {
    $has_widgets = true;
  }
  return $has_widgets;
}
add_filter( 'infinite_scroll_has_footer_widgets', 'cover_infinite_scroll_has_footer_widgets', 10, 1 );

This way, it’s easy enough to detect the menu and indicate the type switch from scroll to click.