Blogging Tips

On November 6th 2008, I published a review on Performancing.com about a cool WordPress plugin called Slayer’s Custom Widgets. This plugin was cool because it was one of the first I’ve seen that enabled users to assign Widgets to certain locations on a WordPress powered blog. Fast forward to today and there is another plugin with the same idea but improves upon usability, accessibility, and overall UI. It’s called Widget Context and was developed by Kaspars Dambis who currently resides in Latvia.

Installation:

To install Widget Context, download the files from here and upload the folder to your plugin directory. Next, login to your WordPress administration panel and activate the plugin. The plugin doesn’t have a dedicated settings page so don’t bother looking.

Usage:

To use Widget Context, login to your WordPress administration page and browse to the Widget management page. Add a widget from the left-hand side of the page to the right. Then, click on the EDIT link to edit the widgets settings. At the bottom of the widget, you should see an extended area of options. This is Widget Context in action.

There are initially two options to choose from. Either displaying a widget on selected or displaying a widget on every page except selected. The check boxes correspond to the various page templates found within a typical WordPress theme. I’m not going to go into detail here with regards to which template files correspond to which options but if you pay attention to themes and notice how they have single.php, archive.php etc. you should be able to connect the dots to figure out which is what.

Ok, now we need an example. Lets say I want to display the default recent comments widget only on the homepage since that is the only place where it makes sense to display it. I would simply add the recent comments widget to the sidebar, click the edit link, select “Display Only On Selected“, check mark the Homepage box and then, click done. The recent comments will now only show up on the homepage.

Conclusion:

While that was a simple example, I think it’s clear how many doors this type of widget granularity opens up. For the longest time, typical end users of WordPress were forced to display widgets in the sidebar which would show up in every single page within WordPress where that sidebar displayed. While I love using widgets, having them show up on every single page in WordPress is cumbersome. Kaspar’s plugin enables you to maximize the use of a themes sidebar/sidebars so that you can place relevant widgets on relevant pages.

For those of you who display 125X125 ads in your sidebar, think about how cool it would be to have multiple ad containers that displayed relevant ads alongside relevant content. For example, I could have a widget that displays ads from WordPress theme developers and then assign that widget to only show up in the sidebar when a post is made in the WordPress themes category.

Mark my words, the functionality provided by Widget Context will somehow find it’s way into a future version of WordPress for all to enjoy.