I got tired of the bugs in php themes hindering my progress, so I switched to the core wordpress theme 2023.
As explained above, I need a 3 column page layout and dynamic sidebars.
Using the 2023 theme that doesn’t have a sider bar meant that I need to “dig under the hood” and actually the sidebars using php in the template.
https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/functionality/sidebars/
Which I was ready to do…
Then I found 2 open-source solutions that are simply awesome and benefit anyone paying subscriptions for buggy php themes to simply dynamically place an element on a page:
I am not affiliated with either one of these plugins, but they solve such a as massive problem, that they simply deserve attention:
Block Visibility
https://wordpress.org/plugins/block-visibility/
And..
Conditional Blocks
https://wordpress.org/plugins/conditional-blocks/
As their names imply… I can simply create my sidebar blocks and then conditionally define where they are displayed..
Big kudos to the developers, but this definitely seems like a missing wordpress “core” functionality” rather than a plugin type of solution