Take Control of Your Widgets

A talk about building a WordPress plugin that controls sidebar and widget visibility depending on the section/page/post being viewed.

Transcript

1. Take Control of Your Widgets Kaspars Dambis konstruktors.com @konstruktors WordCamp Norway 2013
2. Who is this guy?
3. Latvian Champion in Autocross, 2007
4. World's first electric race car to finish Dakar rally in 2012
7. In ❤ since 2007
9. Custom Function Widgets
10. Custom Function Widgets
11. Widget Context Version 0.1
12. A Sidebar?
13. Sidebar "Minima" for Blogger
14. Sidebar "Cubric" in WordPress 1.5 (2005)
15. Sidebar "Twenty Twelve" in WordPress (2012)
16. Sidebars are for related content
17. Widgets in Core Widgets were first provided by a plugin. Available in core since WP 2.2 (May 16, 2007).
18. Widgets in Core Available in core since WP 2.2 (May 16, 2007).
19. Problems 1. Widgets are not attached to the content 2. Widgets can't be edited in context BUT Widgets provide flexibility
20. But Context Matters
21. Solutions 1. Use multiple widget areas (sidebars) and templates to control their appearance 2. Use a plugin
22. Solutions 1. Use multiple widget areas (sidebars) and templates to control their appearance 2. Use a plugin
23. Need to know Template Tags (can't give to clients) Uses evil() eval(); Widget Logic
24. WooSidebars Sidebars as a custom post type. Sidebars in context.
25. Creates a lot of widget areas with custom visibility rules which are defined in another section of the WordPress dashboard. WooSidebars
26. Display Widgets Adds context UI to widget settings.
27. Individual posts and pages can be targeted only by URL patterns, which are hard to understand. Widget Context Adds context UI to widget settings.
28. Problems 1. Widgets can't be edited on per-page basis. 2. Widgets can't be re-ordered on per-page basis
29. Widget Context Experiments
30. Concept A Bring Widget UI into Page Edit Screen
31. Features: Per-page settings; Re-order widgets. Problems: Adding and hiding new widgets requires editing all pages Concept A
32. Concept A Demo
33. Simple Show/Hide option with a list of available rules. Concept B
34. Concept B Demo
35. Concept C
36. Concept C Demo
37. Conclusions 1. Current setup (Sidebar UI) doesn't allow granular widget control. 2. Granular setup (Post Edit UI) is hard to manage on large scale sites.
38. konstruktors.com @konstruktors github.com/kasparsd