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
   

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2. Who is this guy?
   

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3. Latvian Champion in Autocross, 2007
   

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4. World's first electric race car
   to finish Dakar rally in 2012
   

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7. In ❤ since 2007
   

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9. Custom Function Widgets
   

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10. Custom Function Widgets
    

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11. Widget Context
    Version 0.1
    

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12. A Sidebar?
    

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13. Sidebar "Minima" for Blogger
    

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14. Sidebar "Cubric" in WordPress 1.5 (2005)
    

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15. Sidebar "Twenty Twelve" in WordPress (2012)
    

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16. Sidebars are
    for related content
    

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17. Widgets in Core Widgets were first
    provided by a plugin.
    Available in core since
    WP 2.2 (May 16, 2007).
    

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18. Widgets in Core Available in core since
    WP 2.2 (May 16, 2007).
    

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19. Problems
    1. Widgets are not attached to the content
    2. Widgets can't be edited in context
    BUT
    Widgets provide flexibility
    

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20. But Context Matters
    

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21. Solutions
    1. Use multiple widget areas (sidebars) and
    templates to control their appearance
    2. Use a plugin
    

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22. Solutions
    1. Use multiple widget areas (sidebars) and
    templates to control their appearance
    2. Use a plugin
    

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23. Need to know Template Tags
    (can't give to clients)
    Uses evil() eval();
    Widget Logic
    

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24. WooSidebars
    Sidebars as a custom post type.
    Sidebars in context.
    

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25. Creates a lot of widget
    areas with custom
    visibility rules which are
    defined in another
    section of the WordPress
    dashboard.
    WooSidebars
    

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26. Display Widgets
    Adds context UI to widget settings.
    

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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.
    

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28. Problems
    1. Widgets can't be edited on per-page basis.
    2. Widgets can't be re-ordered
    on per-page basis
    

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29. Widget Context
    Experiments
    

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30. Concept A
    Bring Widget UI into Page Edit Screen
    

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31. Features:
    Per-page settings;
    Re-order widgets.
    Problems:
    Adding and hiding
    new widgets requires
    editing all pages
    Concept A
    

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32. Concept A Demo
    

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33. Simple Show/Hide
    option with a list of
    available rules.
    Concept B
    

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34. Concept B Demo
    

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35. Concept C
    

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36. Concept C Demo
    

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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.
    

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38. konstruktors.com
    @konstruktors
    github.com/kasparsd
    

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