It’s an idea proposed by Ipstenu that might just work. The gist of her suggestion is to manage widgets similar to how we manage menus. Instead of all that fancy drag and drop stuff, we switch to a check box approach where users can check which widgets they want to have added to a particular…
You know that annoying problem of when you switch to a theme and then switch back to the original, you lose your widget configuration? It looks like that problem has been solved but the WordPress team needs your help on deciding how long your widget configurations should be saved. Amongst the choices provided, I chose…
I stumbled across this theme the other day called Tachyon by RocketTheme and noticed that is has 70 widget positions. That is insane. I can’t imagine how much of a burden or a nightmare it would be to manage something like that from the back-end of WordPress as just having 15 or so widgets can…
Back on August 25th, the guys over at Interconnect/it released a brand new plugin called Spots. If I had to describe this plugin in one sentence, I’d say it was a text widget on steroids. There are quite a few things that make this plugin very cool to use. The first is that it uses…
Those of you who listened to episode 111 of WordPress Weekly or who have been reading this site for a long time realize that I’m on a quest to find a plugin that provides the right interface for making widgets flexible when it comes to configuring when and where they show up. To fulfill this…
Kaspars Dambis of Konstruktors.com has publised his second version of a proposed user interface design for his popular Widget Context plugin. Widget Context is a plugin that provides users the opportunity to show or hide widgets. I’ve used Widget Context in the past but I’ve been quite happy with the performance and functionality of Widget…
A few weeks ago, there was a poll published on PollDaddy.com that asked the question, What do you call these draggable, expandable boxes in WP? For example, “The Publish _________.”. The choices were postbox, metabox, module, widget, area, container, box, or other. I think the poll question was not specific enough with regards to the…
Chris Coyier published a great technique on the Digging Into WordPress site that explains how to create editable regions instead of text areas that are baked into the theme. For instance, ever get a theme with a block that looks like a widget but it’s really just a div container in the sidebar.php file that…
Kaspar’s has announced on his blog that he has finally added his Widget Context plugin to the WordPress plugin repository. Previously, you had to visit his site to check for updates to the plugin. Now, that will all be handled through the respository. Widget Context enables users to specify where and when widgets are displayed…
A few days ago, Glenn Bennett got in touch with me to let me know about a site called Widgetifyr.com. This site is a service which aims at making the WordPress widget creation process much easier than creating the code from scratch every time. If you’ve ever tried to turn your code into a wordpress…
If you’re using a theme that doesn’t have a widgetized sidebar or if you’re thinking of adding more widget spots to your theme, I recommend reading this two part series by Sarah on BloggingTips.com which walks you through how to create a dynamic sidebar. This is great stuff as it enables you to take your…
It’s been awhile since the last time I’ve created a screencast but last night, I finally opened Camtasia Studio 6. It seemed easier to use this time around versus my first two screencasts with version 5. Upon some initial feedback last night on Twitter, I need to work on the audio portion and also adjust…
Upon upgrading my development site for testing to the latest nightly build of WordPress, I discovered that the first bits and pieces of the Widget management system were added. Just as I had hoped for, the system works like a cross between 2.3 and 2.5 leaning more towards 2.3. On the left, you have a…
Kaspar’s has announced that he has released a new version of his cool Widget Context plugin which fixes the problem of widget settings not being saved the first time around. The plugin also has added a new feature which enables you to show or hide a widget if the blog post has more or less…
Tom Slayer who is the author of the Custom Widgets plugin that I wrote a review about on Performancing.com back in November 2008, sent me a note that he has released version 2.0 of the plugin. One of the things that worried me about the plugin is its interface for how you configured widgets. Thankfully,…