bbPress.org

ok, without me spending hours digging into this, let’s see if we can sort it.

and yes you can cut the code into a functions file by renaming it, but we’ll fix that later.

For the moment, where are you registering the new sidebar? In a main theme for a child theme?

If in a child theme, they won’t register as sidebars have already been loaded. So you need to unload and reload them all in one go (no idea why, it’s just what I learnt when I tried to add a sidebar in my child theme.)

so what my child theme functions file starts with is

remove_action( 'widgets_init', 'twentyten_widgets_init' ); //necessary to replace parent theme's code which is a twentyten theme
function twentytenchild_widgets_init() {
	// Area 1, located at the top of the sidebar.
	register_sidebar( array(
		'name' => __( 'Primary Widget Area', 'twentytenchild' ),
		'id' => 'primary-widget-area',
		'description' => __( 'The primary widget area', 'twentytenchild' ),
		'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget-container %2$s">',
		'after_widget' => '</li>',
		'before_title' => '<h3 class="widget-title">',
		'after_title' => '</h3>',
	) );

so it starts by removing the twentyten sidebar’s and then adds them straight back – my child theme for the twentyten main theme is excitingly called “twentytenchild”!. I have just shown the first widget from the parent theme, all are just copied from the parent theme. Several others follow
Then on the end you add your new sidebar.

Then after that you complete and register them viz :

	//** Register sidebars by running twentyten_widgets_init() on the widgets_init hook. */
add_action( 'widgets_init', 'twentytenchild_widgets_init' );

by the by in your after title you need to change the a/ to /a

Give that a go, and come back if it works, and we’ll then talk about taking the widget into a custom one.