Contextual Widgets

Update: The sale at $10.00 for the very cool Contextual Widgets plugin for WordPress is now live. Included as part of this sale only is a full developer (client/flipper) licence.

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Today Wednesday 18th September at 7.00pm GMT (2.00pm EST), I’m kicking off a 48 hour sale for the Contextual Widgets plugin.

Now I know you might still be wondering a bit at the moment, but I’ll try to explain.

You know how a WordPress theme allows you to drag and drop widgets into the sidebars?  Well it’s usually a case of all or nothing.  Once you’ve dropped them there, all you have is the same widgets in the sidebar on *every* page and post on your site.

There’s no way of saying you don’t want to see a particular widget on a certain page.

Until now.

With “Contextual Widgets” you can choose exactly in which context each widget will appear.

So you may decide that you only want to place a particular ad in a sidebar on a particular page (or context)…

Example #1

You write a blog page that discusses the importance of building a mailing list (the why), but you don’t put in any details about the steps they need to do it (the how). Over in your sidebar are your affiliate ads for an ebook on list building and an autoresponder service that only shows on that page, ie in that particular context.

Example #2

A visitor arrives at your site via a search engine and lands on one of your tag or category archive pages (this happens a lot). They see a call to subscribe and a special offer that’s nowhere else on your site.

Example #3

You’re running a series of tutorials on your site and you don’t want them on general view. To do this you create a set of custom menus for the tutorials and place them in the sidebar only on the tutorials pages themselves.

Aha! Make sense?

There are plenty of contexts built right in:-

• Home – Your site’s blog page if it isn’t set to your front page.
• Front Page – Your site’s front page which can be different to your blog.
• Post – Individual posts, ie not your home/blog page.
• Attachment – For your attachment pages, e.g. movies, audio and images.
• Author – Author archive pages.
• Category – Category archive pages.
• Date – Date archive pages.
• Tag – Tag pages.
• Search – Search results pages.
• Page not found – Your 404 error pages.

Plus every single page you create gets auto-added to the list of contexts.  So every page you write about any topic can be set to show its own unique content in the widgetised areas.

Combine this plugin with “Widgets In It” and you have a very powerful system of control that a standard WordPress installation doesn’t.  😉

From today 18th September at 7.00pm GMT (2.00pm EST) and for the next 48 hours, you can get the Contextual Widgets plugin for just $10. This sale includes a full developer (client/flipper) licence.

 

-Frank Haywood