Two WordPress Plugins that will allow you to create custom sidebars for pages and posts and add custom images for categories, pages and posts.
As many people have discovered, WordPress is a great way to create seo friendly web sites that look fantastic. Even though WordPress is dynamic and flexible, many people quickly outgrow the stock limitations and restrictions with out-of-the-box solutions. WordPress allows people to add and manage content and photos fairly easily. One of the main issues that people have with WordPress is that the right or left sidebars are global. This poses a problem when you want to create individual pages with say unique category or page images in the sidebars.
Maybe you don’t want custom images in the sidebar, but sometimes it is necessary to show different elements on the sidebars for posts or pages. No Worries. . . you can quickly and easily create your own custom sidebars that allow you to create all the widgetized areas you need. Create your own custom sidebars, configure them adding widgets, and replace the default sidebars on the posts or pages you want in just few clicks.
By installing the Custom Sidebars Plugin from your WordPress plugins page you can set new default sidebars for a group of posts or pages easily, with the flexibility of changing them individually. With Custom Sidebars you can:
- Sidebars for all the posts that belong to a category.
- Sidebars for all the posts that belong to a post-type.
- Sidebars for archives (by category, post-type, author, tag).
- Sidebars for the main blog page.
- Sidebars for search results.
The following screenshot shows the plugin options page which is placed in the appearance menu. Here is where you can create, edit or delete sidebars and set the replacement sidebars and reset the sidebars data.
The new sidebars created by the plugin, can be customized in the Widgets menu area. (shown below)
When you go to create a new page or post you will see a new box has been added to the post and page edit forms area, where you can assign your custom sidebars. (see below)
Now, let’s say that you did want to add custom sidebar images to different pages. . . there’s a widget for that too. All you would need to do is a the “Image Widget”. Then in your widget panel you can add custom images wherever you want. (See screenshot below)
