The traditional use of widgets in WordPress is to set it and forget it. After placing and configuring a widget, it stays in the widgetized area until manually removed. Many plugins have extended widgets to add visibility settings that are based on the page or post where the widget appears. But what if you could…
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…
Developed by Hyyan, Flexible Widget Title is a new plugin that enables users to hide widget titles from the frontend of WordPress. When activated, apply brackets to the titles you want to hide. For example, [A Text Widget Title]. Although the same effect can be accomplished by leaving the title field blank, it makes administering…
One of the improvements in WordPress 3.8 was the responsive dashboard. Thanks to this improvement, the option to select the number of columns to display dashboard widgets was removed. The dashboard now shows the appropriate number of columns using the available screen real estate. Unfortunately, for those using wide-screen monitors, this usually means 4-5 skinny…
Activating and deactivating widgets can become quite tedious when testing WordPress themes. Monster Widget is a handy plugin, created by the folks at Automattic. It adds all of the default WordPress widgets to a “monster” widget that you can deploy as one collective instance. Once the widget is added to your sidebar, you’ll see all…
Buckets is a plugin that has been providing an alternative to WordPress widgets for the past two years. Created by plugin developer Matthew Restorff, Buckets allows you to create reusable pieces of content and place them anywhere on your WordPress site. When describing his motivation for creating Buckets, Restorff says that the plugin was meant…
The Widget Customizer plugin is now cleared for takeoff and will land in WordPress 3.9. During the core development meeting today, the plugin was approved to be merged into the WordPress trunk. The days of editing widgets blind will soon be over, as widget editing with live previews will now be a native part of…
WordPress 3.8 “Parker” has been released, named for jazz artist Charlie Parker. Version 3.8 has been in the oven for 49 days. This marks the second release that contains features that started off as plugins first, a development practice we’ve covered on WPTavern at great length. It’s important to note that after upgrading to WordPress…
For years, I’ve been telling WordPress users that the day we can control when and where widgets are displayed is the day WordPress takes a huge leap forward. I always thought instead of having a WordPress theme with sidebars of widgets displayed on specific posts or pages that it would be better if we could…
Widgets make WordPress stand out as one of the most user-friendly CMS options available. The ability to easily place content blocks and features into a widgetized area has made website customization possible for millions of people who don’t know how to code. As mobile browsing has increased over the past few years, widget design is…
If you’ve ever worked on a WordPress site with a long list of widget areas and dozens of widgets, then you know how crowded this page can become. In this scenario the drag-and-drop interface becomes virtually useless, as you struggle to drag the widget to the right area while trying to force your browser window…
Although MP6 may sound like the code name of a covert spy mission, it’s actually one of the most exciting WordPress plugins in the repository right now. MP6 is part of the “features as plugins” initiative and houses the intended design updates to the WordPress admin. The plan is to include the changes in the…
If you use the Jetpack plugin by Automattic, you’ll notice there is an update to version 2.4 available. The changelog for Jetpack is usually a mile long but in this case, I was happy to see that the Widget Visibility module was added to Jetpack. Widget Visibility was made available to WordPress.com earlier this year.
WordPress.com users now have a feature available to them that should have been in the core of WordPress a long time ago. They call it, Widget Visibility. Users can either hide or show widgets based on category, author, tag, date, or page. This covers the most common use cases without having a need to use…
The latest release of one of my favorite plugins, Widget Logic, now has the option to import and export options. The options are saved to a text file which contains all of the conditional logic. Despite using this particular plugin for a long time, it never really occurred to me how nice it would be…