With the so called Widgets a lot of information can be displayed in the sidebar of a WordPress website. Sometimes this can be a little bit too much information and you want to cut the number of widgets displayed. Two plugins can come in handy.
The problem is actually not a problem at all: a default install of WordPress offers a lot of widgets, that can be implemented easily and display a lot of information automatically:
- latest blog entires
- latest comments
- a Tag-Cloud with popular keywords / tags
- search
- links to social media profiles
- links to neighboring websites (Blogroll)
- Shop-Categories
- most popular posts
- etc.
Sooner or later the sidebar might get jammed, overstuffed with widgets, the user doesn’t recognize any of the precious widgets and the User Experience goes down the drain.
This doesn’t have to mean that you should turn off any of the widgets you installed over the time. Instead you should focus – and see what widgets make sense on what page.
Widget-organization meets information Architecture
So sooner or later you should have a look at you collection of widgets and make a plan ,which widget you would want to present in which context / on which page / on which content type. What is the most useful additional piece of information you want to present on that particular page? You’ll need to define a logic behind the display of widgets.
Good news is: there is a rather simple solution to handle such logic: the plugin Widget Logic is light weight and rather easy to handle – maybe a bit too easy to handle. With a few lines of PHP you can define almost every condition you like. And this can be a security risk since everybody with access to the widget administration can inject virtually any type of malicious code.
Here come another plugin handy: the plugin Widget Logic by Path reduces the power of Widget Logic to paths – and in most cases this will probably be exactlty what you would want.
For example: entering the short code <all paths except> will make the widget not show on the pages / paths listed below that short code. Adding <home> will make the widget not show on the front page.
Here’s the links to the above mentioned plugins with additional information: