Improving WordPress Widgets And Menus
By Rob Safuto on Dec 20, 2007 in WordPress | Tags: Drupal , features , WordPress
I think that WordPress would be a lot more useful as website and blogging tool if two areas of the functionality were improved.
WordPress sidebar widgets are a big step up from earlier versions where you had to code by hand to place and arrange different items in the sidebar. But what I really like to see are settings to control which pages the sidebar widgets appear on. For example, I would like a certain widget to only show up on the front page. And some widgets I only want visible on single post page. I’m sure you can mess with code to do this but I’d like to do it by clicking the mouse. This functionality exists in the K2 theme but since my upgrade to 2.3.1 that feature didn’t seem to work. So I am trying a new theme.
I would also like more control over how the menus are built and displayed. I know that this can be done with code. But the more we touch code the more average users are likely to mess something up. And while we spend time messing with the site design we could be creating content. It would be awesome if there were a menu manager that also allowed me to add links to external sites, as well as giving me full control over the menus for page links within my WordPress site.
If any plugins exist that allow me to upgrade to get both of these things in 2.3.1 then I’d greatly appreciate someone pointing me to them.
PS: My other favorite content management system, Drupal, has both of these features in their core distribution.
