WordPress.org

Background and goals of this plugin

Part of offering WordPress as a CMS to my clients involves giving them as much control over the future of their website as possible. One pitfall I experience is offering per-page sidebar customization.

Sidebar templates and conditionals

I find myself creating several sidebar-name.php templates and using conditionals to display them where I want. Functions like is_page(), is_tree(), is_ancestor(), is_single(), etc. let me plan ahead for which sidebars should show on which pages. However, is_page(14) is not an acceptable solution for me, nor does it truly allow customizing sidebar output for pages created in the future outside the scope of my preemptive conditionals.

Page-specific blocks of content in the sidebar

Per Page Sidebar Blocks lets you, the theme developer, create several sidebar templates using WordPress’ naming convention sidebar-name.php.

Automatically finds your sidebar templates

PPSB will scan the current theme’s root directory for all your sidebar templates and let you decide which ones get displayed on each individual page by simply checking a box on that page’s Edit area.

More Information

A full writeup is available at http://www.immense.net/per-page-sidebar-blocks-plugin-wordpress/

Known Bugs

1. If you create a new page and check some PPSB boxes, the checks will not save if the page is published. You must check the boxes after the page is published and save again.