Accessing WooCommerce product categories before initialising widget areas

Where is this function hooked?

widgets_init is hooked into init at priority 1, but WooCommerce registers its taxonomies in init at priority 5. So if you use widgets_init as the hook you won’t be able to use get_terms() because it returns a WP_Error if the taxonomy isn’t registered.

You’ll need to register the widget on init at a priority greater than 5 for this to work, and you should still check that the result of get_terms() isn’t a WP_Error, in case WooCommerce isn’t activated:

function wpse_295558_category_sidebars() {
    $product_cats = get_terms( array(
        'taxonomy'   => 'product_cat',
        'hide_empty' => false,
        'parent'     => 0,
    );

    if ( ! is_wp_error( $product_cats ) ) {
        foreach ( $product_cats as $product_cat ) {
            register_sidebar( array(
                'name'          => 'Filter sidebar -' . $product_cat->name,
                'id'            => 'filter_sidebar_' . $product_cat->name,
                'before_widget' => '<div class="filter-sidebar-' . $product_cat->name . '">',
                'after_widget'  => '</div>',
                'before_title'  => '<h2 class="filter-title">',
                'after_title'   => '</h2>',
            ) );
        }
    }
}
add_action( 'init', 'wpse_295558_category_sidebars', 10 );

This seems like an unwieldy method to achieve whatever you’re after though. Wouldn’t it be better to have one sidebar for categories and then have the widgets dynamically respond to which category you’re viewing? This is already how the bundled filter widgets work in WooCommerce.

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