Kaspars Dambis held this presentation at WorCamp Norway 2013. Kaspar Dambis is a Latvian working at Metronet in Oslo. He is the creator of the popular Widget Context plugin. He blogs about WordPress at konstruktors.com and be found on Twitter at @konstruktors.

1. Take Control of
Your Widgets
Kaspars Dambis
konstruktors.com
@konstruktors
WordCamp Norway 2013

2. Who is this guy?

3. Latvian Champion in Autocross, 2007

4. World's first electric race car
to finish Dakar rally in 2012

7. In ❤ since 2007

9. Custom Function Widgets

10. Custom Function Widgets

11. Widget Context
Version 0.1

12. A Sidebar?

13. Sidebar "Minima" for Blogger

14. Sidebar "Cubric" in WordPress 1.5 (2005)

15. Sidebar "Twenty Twelve" in WordPress (2012)

16. Sidebars are
for related content

17. Widgets in Core
Widgets were first
provided by a plugin.
Available in core since
WP 2.2 (May 16, 2007).

18. Widgets in Core
Available in core since
WP 2.2 (May 16, 2007).

19. Problems
1. Widgets are not attached to the content
2. Widgets can't be edited in context
BUT
Widgets provide flexibility

20. But Context Matters

21. Solutions
1. Use multiple widget areas (sidebars) and
templates to control their appearance
2. Use a plugin

22. Solutions
1. Use multiple widget areas (sidebars) and
templates to control their appearance
2. Use a plugin

23. Widget Logic
Need to know Template Tags
(can't give to clients)
Uses evil() eval();

24. WooSidebars
Sidebars as a custom post type.
Sidebars in context.

25. WooSidebars
Creates a lot of widget
areas with custom
visibility rules which are
defined in another
section of the WordPress
dashboard.

26. Display Widgets
Adds context UI to widget settings.

27. Widget Context
Adds context UI to widget settings.
Individual posts and
pages can be targeted
only by URL patterns,
which are hard to
understand.

28. Problems
1. Widgets can't be edited on per-page basis.
2. Widgets can't be re-ordered
on per-page basis

29. Widget Context
Experiments

30. Concept A
Bring Widget UI into Page Edit Screen

31. Concept A
Features:
Per-page settings;
Re-order widgets.
Problems:
Adding and hiding
new widgets requires
editing all pages

32. Concept A Demo

33. Concept B
Simple Show/Hide
option with a list of
available rules.

34. Concept B Demo

35. Concept C

36. Concept C Demo

37. Conclusions
1. Current setup (Sidebar UI) doesn't allow
granular widget control.
2. Granular setup (Post Edit UI) is hard to
manage on large scale sites.

38. konstruktors.com
@konstruktors
github.com/kasparsd