MIGHTYminnow’s Favorite WordPress Plugins: Widget Context

MIGHTYminnow's Favorite Plugins: Widget ContextOur next stop in MIGHTYminnow’s favorite WordPress plugins is Widget Context. This plugin allows you to specify exactly where your widgets do and don’t show up. Using widget context, you can tell a widget to only appear on a certain page, in a specific section (e.g. all pages under About Us), or everywhere on your site except for in certain circumstances (like excluding posts from 2008). We use Widget Context on just about every site we build to do things like the following:

  • showing related blog posts only on blog pages
  • adding page-specific related content
  • showing other event links on event pages
  • adding related testimonials for page-specific products or services

MIGHTYminnow's Favorite Plugins: Widget ContextOne of the big perks of Widget Context is that it adds controls right onto your existing widgets, which means you don’t have to navigate away from your Widgets panel to make changes. These added controls are where the magic happens, allowing you to choose a “context” for your widget in one of two ways:

  1. Checkboxes
    Choose from some common selections like Front Page, All Posts, 404 Error, etc
  2. Target by URL
    Specify a URL pattern (yes, you can use wildcards!) to match

Depending on how many pages you want the widget on your sidebar to show up, you either choose to show or hide the widget on selected posts/pages that match the criteria you’ve selected. If you know that you want the widget on all blog related content, you might choose the Show on Selected drop-down option and check the boxes for  Blog Index, All Posts, and All Archives.

The URL targeting feature is pretty handy as well, allowing you to target a specific page, a page and all of it’s sub-pages, and much more. To target a specific page, you use the UNIQUE part of the URL. For example:

  • A single page:
    To add a widget just to this page: http://www.mysite.com/services/, you would include “services” (without the quotes) in the “target by URL” box.
  • Child pages:
    To add a widget to all child pages of services, but NOT services itself, you would add “services/*” (without the quotes) in the “target by URL” box.
  • A site section including parent and child pages:
    To add a widget to the services page and all its children, you would add “services*” (without the quotes and without the slash from the example above) in the “target by URL” box.

Notes:

  • When entering multiple pages to target, each page goes on one line and you don’t want to have a blank line after the last one.
  • The URLs for pages you target can be complex – adding widgets to a deeply nested page or section works the same as the above, just include the complete string for the unique part of the URL, like: “services/web/hourly”, “services/web/hourly*” or “services/web/hourly/*”

Thoughts? Comments? Questions? As always, we love to hear from you. Check out the comments section below.

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