The original Monster Widget plugin is a handy tool created by Automattic to assist theme developers with testing. Essentially, it allows you to quickly drop all core widgets into your sidebar at once, saving you the trouble of having to add them individually.
Now you can get the same for bbPress and BuddyPress, thanks to a two new plugins from @mercime, a contributor on both WordPress sister projects.
The BuddyPress Monster Widget makes it easy to populate your sidebar with all of the BP core widgets, including the following:
- Log In
- Members
- Who’s Online
- Recently Active Members
- Friends
- Groups
- Sitewide Messages
- Recent Networkwide Posts
The widgets are pre-configured to show a set number of blog posts, members, friends, etc. The list of widgets displayed can be altered by using the ‘buddypress-monster-widget-config’ filter included in the plugin.
The bbPress Monster Widget plugin allows you to add all of the bbPress core widgets to your sidebar in one instance, including:
- Log In
- Forum Views
- Forum Search Form
- Forums
- Forum Topics
- Forum Statistics
- Forum Replies
The bbPress Monster Widget also comes pre-configured with a set number of topics and replies displayed. The default list of widgets can be altered by using the ‘bbpress-monster-widget-config’ filter.
When creating a theme for public distribution, it’s important to make sure you know how the core widgets are going to look with your theme applied. This is especially true for community-oriented sites that utilize bbPress and BuddyPress, because the widgets often play a big part in connecting members to recent activity on the site. Download the bbPress and BuddyPress monster widgets from WordPress.org to make it quick and easy to test the core widgets.
Thank you for featuring the plugins :) Big thanks to @imath for reviewing both plugins and contributing as well.