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Take Control of
Your Widgets
Kaspars Dambis
konstruktors.com
@konstruktors
WordCamp Norway 2013
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Who is this guy?
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Latvian Champion in Autocross, 2007
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World's first electric race car
to finish Dakar rally in 2012
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In ❤ since 2007
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Custom Function Widgets
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Custom Function Widgets
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Widget Context
Version 0.1
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A Sidebar?
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Sidebar "Minima" for Blogger
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Sidebar "Cubric" in WordPress 1.5 (2005)
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Sidebar "Twenty Twelve" in WordPress (2012)
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Sidebars are
for related content
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Widgets in Core Widgets were first
provided by a plugin.
Available in core since
WP 2.2 (May 16, 2007).
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Widgets in Core Available in core since
WP 2.2 (May 16, 2007).
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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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But Context Matters
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Solutions
1. Use multiple widget areas (sidebars) and
templates to control their appearance
2. Use a plugin
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Solutions
1. Use multiple widget areas (sidebars) and
templates to control their appearance
2. Use a plugin
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Need to know Template Tags
(can't give to clients)
Uses evil() eval();
Widget Logic
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WooSidebars
Sidebars as a custom post type.
Sidebars in context.
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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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Display Widgets
Adds context UI to widget settings.
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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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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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Widget Context
Experiments
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Concept A
Bring Widget UI into Page Edit Screen
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Features:
Per-page settings;
Re-order widgets.
Problems:
Adding and hiding
new widgets requires
editing all pages
Concept A
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Concept A Demo
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Simple Show/Hide
option with a list of
available rules.
Concept B
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Concept B Demo
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Concept C
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Concept C Demo
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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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konstruktors.com
@konstruktors
github.com/kasparsd