Comments on: Use a widget in a page or post with a shortcode

By: Manual Placement of NextGen Gallery Widget - WordPress Tavern Forum

Manual Placement of NextGen Gallery Widget - WordPress Tavern Forum — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:21:44 +0000

[...] Fuzz Is this possible? I would like to place the widget without using a sidebar Have a look at this [...]

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:29:44 +0000

Hi Anna – Thanks for that simple solution, unfortunately i’m a simple person and don’t know how to do any of that. Please can you show me?

By: anna-marie

anna-marie — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:57:04 +0000

Hi Jon,
Why don’t you just put the html of the widget header in around the shortcode? That should be pretty simple.

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:58:02 +0000

Love the plugin, i have been using it in conjunction with tables to put 3 widgets in a row. it’s a shame that it does not put the widget block/header graphic in. Is it possible to do this?

By: Renee

Renee — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:29:17 +0000

I have a widget that is a daily quote, can I use this plug-in to post the quotes on a post page instead of the side bar and it include the previous quotes on the same page?

By: IKS

IKS — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 04:27:19 +0000

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.

By: anna-marie

anna-marie — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 03:55:26 +0000

Dear IKS,
If you look back at the comments a couple before yours, eg: Adrians http://webdesign.anmari.com/shortcode-any-widget/#comment-3955
you will see that the problem occurs with themes that use numbered sidebars rather than named sidebars.

No information is deleted and the effect is NOT intentional. If you deactivate the plugin your theme should grab the no.1 spot again.

Some fix ideas are mentioned above. I had spend quite a bit if time looking at it, to try to get wordpress to add the shortcode sidebar later after the themes, however did not succeed and had to move on to real work. (I’ve never liked the way that wordpress does the sidebars and this is one of the reasons why – but perhaps the problem is the themes being a bit “casual” with their sidebars? or wordpress allowing a casualness?)

A nice big warning has now been added to the plugin home page.

By: IKS

IKS — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:07:07 +0000

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.

By: Adrian

Adrian — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:43:02 +0000

Thanks for the response Anne-Marie and yes, I agree it is undoubtedly an inherent problem with the theme and not the plugin, (or maybe not a problem, but perhaps a fundamental issue with sidebar management in WP, as it says also in the link you provided)

I did actually get the theme to work with the plugin by tweaking functions.php, but then, as we always do, went off at another tangent and ended up working on something else.

I’m quite enjoying learning about how WP fits together and looking at how plugins and themes are coded is a great help.

Thanks again and have a nice day

By: anna-marie

anna-marie — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:01:54 +0000

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

the way that wordpress does the sidebars and
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

change your theme to use named sidebars – see the functions.php in your theme and the sidebar.php
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.
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