Use a widget in a page or post with a shortcode

I’m using WP 2.8.5 and the Thematic Framework.
I get the following error trying to use a Query Posts Widget in my page with the following shortcode [do_widget "query posts"]:

Warning: array_intersect() [function.array-intersect]: Argument #2 is not an array in /*/*/*/*/wp-content/plugins/amr_shortcode_any_widget.php on line 57

line 57:
/* get the intersect of the 2 widget setups so we just get the widget we want */
$wid = array_intersect ($_wp_sidebars_widgets[$sidebarid],$widget_ids );
if ($debug) { echo ‘Chosen Widget ids in Chosen sidebar’;print_r($wid);}

I also wan’t to ask how can I use more than one instace of the same widget, since they have the same name.

Thank you,

Hey! thank you.
Works with [do_widget "Query Posts"] but it doesn’t work with [do_widget id="query-posts-n"], it doesn’t return any errors but renders no content. I inspected the widget and got it’s id that’s clearly visible in the widgets panel HTML code and when it renders correctly in the page.

any clue?

I’ll be using Display Widgets plugin to restrict appereance in the meantime.

Thank you.

Well – my requirement was to use query posts in a way that would work across themes – ie I did not want to have to write theme templates that did what query posts does.

QP did not have a shortcode and while I could modify it, I prefer to stay with the upgrade path.

Many author seems to deliver a widget without also doing a shortcode – it is quite easy to offer both callingthe same code.

…and so “do widget” was born. It can be used for any widget since it is essentially capturing the output of the widget function and returning that as the shortcode function result.

Hi Anna-Marie,

Nice plugin and it does what it “says on the tin”. My only issue with it is that it seems to interfere with the other Sidebars on my site. It’s as though, even though the sidebar isn’t displayed by the theme (Atahualpa342), the sidebar grabs the formatting done for the first sidebar on my site. So effectively side bar one loses formatting, side bar two uses formatting of side bar one, side bar three uses formatting of side bar two and so on (I have 5 sidebars).

I haven’t had time to properly investigate (mostly due to a 3 year old toddler running around wanting to play at pirates!), my initial thought is that the sidebar registered for the plugin might need to be in functions.php

Thanks again for the plugin. I have a feeling its gone to be exactly what I need to work with, as you suggested, the Query Posts plugin

Adrian

Hi Adrian,
Yes I can see two year old pirates could be quite distracting – I have the ambitious young chef problem, but I think that is easier to deal with!

I think that there is a problem for the plugin with

1. the way that wordpress does the sidebars and
2. theme’s that use numbered sidebars rather than named ones (eg: the default theme)

Because the plugin is registering the “shortcode” sidebar, and plugins run before themes I think – it seems to grab the no. 1 slot. This seems to shift any theme numbered sidebar to 2nd place – this happens with the default theme. This is not a problem with themes that register and access their sidebars by name (eg: the ithemes series).

I did play around seeing if I could get the “shortcode” sidebar to register later, but no go.

Because of this I did spend some time looking at whether one could use the dummy “inactive widgets sidebar” and did hit some annoyances there and have not had a chance to get back to it.

This is sort of related to the Sidebars and Switching themes problem if one want to reuse a group of widgets – see http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic.php?id=2550.

So to fix for you…. you could

1. change your theme to use named sidebars – see the functions.php in your theme and the sidebar.php
2. see if one of the other plugins will work better – there are a couple that say they create dummy sidebars that can then be accessed from a page. I suspect that they will have the same problem with your theme.
3. Wait to see if I have time to work further on using the inactive widgets sidebar instead of a special “shortcode” one – that way one could configure the widget in the theme’s sidebar and then move it to inactive and access by id there

While I liked the feature that this plug-in gave at first, I have noticed in the second day using it that it doesn’t seem to play well with some other plug-ins. It sometimes switches the order of all of my widgets (on other pages and sidebars) around, and sometimes deletes the content within my other sidebars completely. I’m not sure if it’s just a specific plug-in that I have that it doesn’t work well with as I use several, but those who are planning to use this in conjunction with some of the more common plug-ins may want to beware. Back up the content & code within your sidebar widgets so that if it gets deleted you can at least replace it easily. I’m having to re-do a lot of things on our new site because I hadn’t anticipated this issue, but I at least wanted others to be aware.

If there is any fix I’d be interested to know what it is, because otherwise I’m left with creating the new page template, sidebar etc.

Hi Anmari,

Unfortunately, even when I deactivated the plug-in nearly all of my content from the widgets in my other sidebars was gone (save for two widgets, I think). It’s rather unfortunate that the problem seems to be the theme, as I don’t intend to change it and I’m not sure how to go forward with the fix that involves editing functions.php and sidebar.php (I really wouldn’t know what to change). Oh well, the solution would have been perfect if it had worked.