[Plugin: Dynamic Widgets] Request: Dynamic widget support for Buddypress

This might be asking a bit much, as we’re already putting the existing BP features to good use, but:

I find that when users are in the forum index (http://examples.com/forums) they browse; they look around for new information, stuff that wasn’t there last time they looked.

When they’re browsing a thread (http://example.com/groups/general-support/forum/topic/how-do-i-do-this/) they’re in reading mode; they were led here by a link that said “what you’re looking for is (probably) in here” and so now they want to read this content with minimal distractions, i.e. no distracting sidebar widgets.

This is why I’d like the forum index page to be separate from topic pages, in terms of sidebars. There’s also the cost argument. For every forum index that is opened, another 5 forum topics are viewed, but it always starts with the forum index. So why re-load all that add-on information 5 more times, when the reader was most likely to have noticed it when first browsing the forum index anyhow?

In a cost argument, this is still not ideal as Dynamic Widgets removes the widgets from the sidebar at the moment the page is rendering.

Oh I was not aware, that’s some valuable info.

It seems I was a little too brief though. It’s still the right tool, I just didn’t explain my intended use-case in full –though with the newfound knowledge about the rendering queue I might have to reconsider if it turns out there’s a less resource-intensive method we could try.

We’d still display widgets in topic-view, but only relevant ones. Hopefully we can find or create some context-specific widgets that can do (show) things like “threads with same tag”, “similar topics”, “posts by same author” and so forth. I imagine that would be the type of information that would add value to the page, rather than bloat it.