Long term readers (as in REALLY long term, those who were pressganged encouraged to start reading 18 months ago) will remember the fun and games I’ve been through to get area specific widgets to display on this blog. Originally I used the King Text widget, though WordPress 2.2 (2.3?) broke critical parts of the code, and no updates were to be found. I then moved onto using some PHP code within ExecPHP widgets (probably fixable, but I’m a hacker of other peoples code, not a proper coder), though this then prevented me from using PHP within the actual widget I wanted to display. Now it looks as though there is a decent solution. Slayer’s Custom Widgets is able to ensure that any of your current widgets are only displayed on certain pages/categories/posts etc. This would mean I can once again play around a little more with code, and find new and interesting ways to break this site 🙂 As I don’t have the time or inclination to repair my potential goof ups for now, I’ll leave experimenting with this plugin for now, I just wanted to post a quick heads up for other WordPress users who might be interested.
Oct 25 2008
October 25th, 2008 5:22 pm
Hey Chris, feel free to play around with the plugin, if you find any bugs or you would like to suggest a feature feel free to email me
cheers,
Tom
October 26th, 2008 2:52 pm
Thanks, it’ll probably be mid-November before I get a chance to play around, but looking forward to the flexibility your plugin will hopefully give me back 🙂
October 28th, 2008 6:23 pm
I was hoping to find a widget that displayed different things in the geographic regions. Looks like a good tool that I may try out.
October 28th, 2008 7:34 pm
Ah, I hadn’t even though of the title being interpreted that way. I imagine it wouldn’t be too difficult, for someone with coding skills. Not me then 🙂
December 27th, 2008 10:51 am
Just thought I would chime in here to let you know that we developed a similar plugin a few months ago and released it bug free after extensive testing. It provides a few more bells a whistles than the one described above.
Here’s everything you can do with the Widget Locationizer:
1. Assign widget to display via TAGS
2. Assign widget to display via CATEGORIES
3. Assign widget to display via POST/PAGE ID
4. Assign widget to display EVERYWHERE
5. Assign widget to display EVERYWHERE EXCEPT X, Y, Z, ETC.
6. Assign NOFOLLOW OR DOFOLLOW
Thus it provides you the ability to provide fresh interesting sidebar content and more relevant ads that can improve CTR and increase sales.
If you’re interested you can find it here: http://tomuse.com/wordpress/widget-locationizer
We are currently working on an extended version with much more flexibility that will be released any day now! 🙂
December 28th, 2008 7:53 pm
Just in case it isn’t clear from the comment, Widget Locationizer is a premium plugin – you will need to pay for it.
I’ve not tried it out myself, so can’t pass on my thoughts, however the comment itself wasn’t at all spammy, so happy to leave links as is, in case others find them of interest/use.
December 29th, 2008 12:24 am
Thanks for mentioning that Chris. We are in the process of moving that to the Official WordPress Plugin Repository and making it freely available to everyone under the GPL. I appreciate you allowing the original comment 🙂
December 30th, 2008 11:58 pm
Hey Chris,
Widget locationizer is available for FREE download now at the location cited above (https://chrismerriman.com/area-specific-widgets/#comment-27647). Feel free to try it out and shoot me some feedback. I’d really appreciate it. Thanks!
December 31st, 2008 8:12 pm
Will do – if you’ve not heard back in a couple of weeks, send me a reminder – New Year, and two broken PCs currently being fixed mean my attention span lasts only a couple of minutes 🙂