Really good question that I don’t have an answer for, but I found it nagging me as I wondered how I might approach this.
You can have multiple ‘widgetized’ sidebars in one theme, so why not qualify which is displayed according to whether is_home() or is_page()?
Unfortunately you can’t duplicate widgets on both sidebars and I suspect that may reflect the real issue/conflict with this approach.
Anyone else have any ideas or suggestions?
It’s certainly an interesting one. Surely this must be possible, and surely there is a demand for it??
I’m going to toss this into the hackers list, see if anything floats up…
Martin: It appears that in the native WP it cannot be done. However, someone on the wp-hackers list pointed out this plugin that might achieve what you desire: http://nybblelabs.org.uk/projects/sidebar-modules/
Check it out and report back!
Please NOTE: You have to disable the ‘Automattic’ Sidebar Widget plugin to use this one…
Thanks for the link, Sam.
I must say I’m reluctant to take the plunge and try this plugin without some seal of approval from Wp users; I really don’t want to have it buggering up my site in any way. I’m considering setting up a test site first to see how it goes.
Has anyone used this plugin, and can anyone give any feedback? Is it substantially better than WordPress Sidebar Widgets?
I checked Sidebar Modules out for a few minutes today, and it seems pretty clever – it does all you want, and is a good way more capable than sidebar widgets – it also is compatible with any widgets you have installed, and includes its own PHP modules and things like that (a module is a widget is a module). I didn’t go through it thoroughly because I haven’t had time yet, but it has been recently updated and was a project started before sidebar widgets. If it works out I will definitely switch to Modules, the features are very handy.
Check out King Widgets… several different ones all sharing the same framework… can be set to show up on one page but not the other!!!
http://www.blog.mediaprojekte.de/category/cms-systeme/wordpress-plugins/
I’d like to put my vote in for Ben Sherratt’s excellent Sidebar Modules (listed above). I first tried King Widgets and I’m sure it’s really powerful and all that, but wow was it hard to use. Very cryptic and hardcore.
Ben’s module approach is fantastic. It does what it advertises, very easy to use, simply great. Works with all your old widgets too!
Goodbye Sidebar Widgets plugin. 🙂
King Framework screwed up my widgets. Others no longer work nor can I drag or drop. Anyone else encounter this problem? As of now, my blog is fried.
Delete the King framework and widgets and the blog should be OK. I have had trouble with King since 2.2 and all the repairs have not completely worked. I wrote a comment at the King site so I hope he will see it. There were other, similar comments, there.
