3 Mar 2009

TS Custom Widgets v 2.0 – sexier than ever!

The 10 days of awsome releases debutes today with Custom Widgets 2.0. This is a release everyone is excited about, and which contains tons of improvements, bug fixes and extra addons.

The most significant change you will notice will be the overall design of the Custom widgets options pannel.  We’ve updated the old Wordpress 2.6 styled design to suit the new and sleek design of Wordpress 2.7. Along with the new design we’ve fixed several compatibility bugs and implemented two much requested features: Widget name display, and more organized management. Click image below for preview.

Your text widgets will now have their title displayed in the widget management section, and finding posts you want to assign a specific widget to just got a lot easier. We got a suggestion from mufasa in which he suggested we add scroll bars to all the widget categories.

As you can see on the management preview we did implement his suggestion to the widgets that are assigned.

I talked to mbogdan and he suggested we don’t implement this feature for posts and tags, because displaying 1000+ posts at a time would put a huge load on the server and database, so to make everything simpler we added pagination to almost all sections.

All  posts/tags/pages, etc are organized alphabetically and by this way using the pagination you will easily find the post or item you want to assign a widget to. Cool huh? Also lets not forget mentioning that using the master tick box you can select multiple posts at once. Click image below for preview.

Basically the bottom line is that you will find the new version of custom widgets more flexible and more simple to use. Even a newbie wordpress user can manage it!

Download Custom Widgets 2.0

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Click here to start TS Custom widgets v2.0 download

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Installation & Usage

***To upgrade from CW 1.2 to v2.0 simply overwrite the old files with the new ones.

1) Download the .zip file to your computer and log into your wordpress admin panel.

2) In your admin panel head over to the plugins section and select the Add new segment. Browse to the custom widgets.zip file and click the Install button. Wordpress will unzip the plugin and install it for you.

3) Click the Activate Plugin link, after which you will notice the TS Custom Widgets segment in the bottom of the menu. Clicking it will take you to the management panel.

4) Before you can assign  “custom widget” you will have to head over to the good ‘ol widgets section in  the Apperance section and add or create new widgets. Once you’re done head over to TS Custom widgets section and assign your widget(s) to the desired sections.

5) That’s it, repeat the second part of step 4 with all the widgets you wish to turn into “custom widgets”

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slayer

Skilled web designer, with an in-depth knowledge of web 2.0 and latest industry standards
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 7:03 pm and is filed under Plugins & Releases, TS Releases, Themes & Plugins (all). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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User Comments

  • Suzie - 04 Mar 2009 12AM

    Your text widgets will now have their title displayed in the widget management section

    I’m having a bit of trouble with that. My text widgets still all just say Text, no titles.

    I completely removed the plugin and started fresh, still no go.

    Any suggestions?

    Thanks,
    Suzie

  • slayer - 04 Mar 2009 6AM

    Hey Suzie,

    thats weird, we did lots of testing and everything is fine. Are you using a wordpress version prior to 2.6?

  • Suzie - 04 Mar 2009 7AM

    Hey, I fixed it.

    Line 60 of admin_template_main.php,
    Change wp_widget_text
    to widget_text

    Works great now!

    (I’m using 2.7)

    Thanks!

  • slayer - 04 Mar 2009 6PM

    Hey Suzie,

    i’m glad to hear you were able to manage the issue

    we did some more testing and we couldn’t reproduce the issue, everything is working fine with “wp_widget_text” on our side

    cheers,
    Tom

  • Mark - 13 Mar 2009 12PM

    Was wondering about something on Custom Widgets..
    When one assigns a widget to appear on archive pages it appears on any page that falls under is_archive(), As that tag captures all archive type pages, regardless of how I organize my templates, any archive type shows the widget. I was wondering if there is any way to have the archive page option exclude, for example, categories pages.
    Any suggestions would be great, and thanks for such an awsome widget.

  • Drew - 16 Mar 2009 8PM

    Nice plug-in here. Everything seems to be working fine but I can not get a widget to just show up on my ‘Blog” page. I have tried reinstalling the plug-in to no avail. Funny thing is I can get a widget to show up on any other single page, just not the “Blog” page.

    Any suggestions?

    Drew

  • Drew - 16 Mar 2009 8PM

    UPDATE:

    It seems there is a conflict when using the ’static page’ option in WP. I have my front page and blog page set to a static page and no matter what I change them to I can’t get a custom widget to be singled out on the static ‘blog page’. Hope that helps.

    Thanks again.

    Drew

  • John - 17 Mar 2009 5PM

    Cannot seem to get this to work within my Dark Essence theme by ithemes. Any idea if this will work with that theme?

    Thanks,
    john

  • amy - 18 Mar 2009 1AM

    Love the plugin!
    I may just be dim – but I’m having trouble getting a widget to show on both the blogpage AND post pages.
    any thoughts?

  • pbravin - 28 Mar 2009 2PM

    i disabled the widget from all pages except “Phil’s Musings…” which is my wordp[ress blog page–its now showing up on the blog site–it shows Phil/’s–i did not add the backslash–your software apparently did it

  • Susan - 04 Apr 2009 12AM

    I can’t get Custom Widgets to appear on my posts page
    http://76.12.159.56/?page_id=73

    It works fine on the static pages, and fine on the tags page, but not the main posts page.

    This is the same for my template and the default wordpress template. Any suggestions?
    Thanks
    Susan

  • Susan - 04 Apr 2009 2AM

    I meant that my problem was the same for my theme and the default wordpress theme.

  • Susan - 04 Apr 2009 12PM

    Close thread. I figured it out. I didn’t have enough of the extended features checked.

  • Shannon - 05 Apr 2009 4AM

    I’m having the same issue as Suzie: text widgets aren’t showing their title in the Custom Widgets page. I’ve yet to try the solution that Suzie mentioned, but thought you should know that more than one person is experiencing this issue, so maybe something can be done to fix it. Thanks for an otherwise amazing plugin!

  • Shannon - 05 Apr 2009 5AM

    I can confirm that the fix Suzie mentioned also worked for me!

  • Shannon - 06 Apr 2009 2AM

    I just made a donation for this excellent plugin..

    I’m currently unable to get widgets to display on tag pages. I don’t know if it’s related, but I notice that when choosing which tags to display, the button says ‘add selected categories’ rather than ‘add selected tags’. Any help would be appreciated.

  • Murray - 10 Apr 2009 4PM

    This is a fabulous plugin. I love it!
    I’m having trouble with one page on my site. I’m using a static page as the home page and created a blog page. It’s the blog page that won’t display the widgets. It displays properly on each blog post and I have full control of which widgets to display.
    Any ideas of why it won’t display on the blog page?
    Thanks
    Murray

  • Nadeem Aslam - 20 May 2009 4PM

    Hi

    1st let me say Great Plugin. But i’ve hit a issue. I can setup all widgets as i want fine. But if i decide i no longer wnat widget x only to appear in one cat, but like to change it back to all.

    When i edit it and remove cat and it reads all and everything looks right. The widget stops appearing altogther.

    I’ve tried the reset widget button several times. I’ve tried removing widget from it’s place in WP and re adding and saving changes. But nothing appears to work.

    Has anyone else has this issue. How can i work around this. As in general not major issues.

  • Ruzzian - 26 May 2009 1PM

    When I select a widget to only show on certain pages, there is no option to show on the home page. Noticed others with same problem, but didn’t see the solution. Awesome app!
    Thanks!

  • Yael - 08 Jun 2009 8AM

    awesome plugin. Thanks, Slayer.

    Just a note though as has been mentioned — I can’t get anything to appear on the blog sidebar. Same set up as someone else mentioned: I’m using a static page as the home page and created a blog page. It’s the blog page that won’t display the widgets.

    All the best, Yael

  • karen McAdams - 11 Jun 2009 6AM

    this is exactly what i was looking for and works great except for the blog page that i have set as my static page for posts. I selected the page i have set as the static page for posts in the widget ui for pages and the widgets dont display. However, if i set a different page as the post page, the widget do appear on the page i selected under the pages UI. this appears to be a bug with static pages set for posts.

  • Luke - 29 Jun 2009 6PM

    Hi

    This is a fantastic plugin. Thanks for creating. I have just put on a new child theme which has 2 extra widget areas – one of which is a Utility:Splash located below the heade. The plugin is not recognizing either of these 2 widget areas ?? though it recognises all the others. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I have deleted plugin and reinstalled but no change. thanks. Luke

  • Joe Pea - 04 Jul 2009 2AM

    Hey, the plugin isn’t working for me! Can you help me fix it?

  • Deborah Hanchey - 05 Jul 2009 7PM

    I’m having problems with step 4: Before you can assign “custom widget” you will have to head over to the good ‘ol widgets section in the Appearance section and add or create new widgets.

    I don’t see a way to add or create new widgets when I go to the Appearance/Widgets section.

    Does anyone has a suggestion? Thanks a bunch.

  • Kevin Law - 06 Jul 2009 5AM

    Hey slayer, how do I make a donation? The Chip In event posted here has ended.

  • Stephen Heck - 10 Jul 2009 1AM

    I am having a problem, it was working fine then now that I upgraded and did a fresh install. when clicking on a widget to customize I get this….
    /wp-admin/admin.php image /wp-admin/admin.php

  • Joe Pea - 11 Jul 2009 7PM

    Hey, it’s not working for me. I can’t get to any of the edit pages for each widget. When I click on the name of a widget (blue or red) it just returns an empty XML file…. ?????

    Here’s a screenshot:
    http://www.bettafootwear.com/tempDELETE/NotWorking.JPG

  • Joe Pea - 11 Jul 2009 8PM

    Could the problem be related to this (screenshot)?:

    http://www.bettafootwear.com/tempDELETE/CouldBeProblem.JPG

  • angela - 13 Jul 2009 12AM

    Yeah, can’t wait until you can work out that bug with static pages for the home page… Glad I’m not the only one with this issue.

  • Ken D - 23 Jul 2009 1AM

    Hi,
    Cool plugin! I’m using it in a site with a bunch of pages… about 26 so far…one widget is basically on every page but home… The pages I added today aren’t showing the widget.. Odd thing is when looking at the source, it looks like the widget wrapper is coming through… but not the contents.
    If you want to take a look look at http://www.tereshalee.com and any page but home… L sidebar – music player Is shows on most pages but if you to the last few pages on the “songs” dropdown… the player is absent. I have removed the widget and reinstalled it and re-entered the Custom Widget entries… but it still acts the same…
    Hope you can help!

  • Bill Bennett - 31 Jul 2009 6AM

    I can’t figure out how to make a widget appear only on my fixed pages and not on the posts or down the side of the blog list.

  • Len - 05 Aug 2009 3AM

    Thanks for a great plug-in. I’m trying to get it to appear in the admin area for other users, but it only appears for the “Administrator” role. Is there something I can edit to make it appear for “Editors” or other custom roles? I’m using Role Manager plugin to create a custom user role.

    Thanks!

  • Dan Milward - 16 Aug 2009 10PM

    I’m really glad to read about the improvement to the text widgets. That is awesome news!!!

    I talked to mbogdan and he suggested we don’t implement this feature for posts and tags, because displaying 1000+ posts at a time would put a huge load on the server and database, so to make everything simpler we added pagination to almost all sections.

    I agree regarding posts and tags. I think the scroll bar should be optional though for pages – we have 30 pages to go through and sometimes you forget the page names so alphabetical order doesnt really help in my situation.

    I think turning scroll bars on for fast servers should be an optional configuration.

    Also an AJAX search would be freaking awesome. I wish I had the resource to make this patch for you guys.

    Love your work!! Keep it up :)

    - Dan

  • Chel - 19 Aug 2009 4PM

    Hello.

    I am having the same problem Suzie was and also that Shannon was having where custom text widgets are not showing their title vs. just showing up as ‘Text’ in the admin panel.

    I did try the fix Suzie and Shannon indicated worked for them, but its not working for me unfortunately. I am running Version 2.8.4 of wordpress.

    Thank you for a great plug in! Hopefully we can figure this out because this is the ONLY truly annoying thing about it. Considering I have about 110 widgets that are ‘text’ I really need to get this fixed ;)

  • Dez - 23 Aug 2009 2AM

    Awesome. Working with it now on my blog. Made the process of having non-ad and ad-supported categories much easier than I expected. (Definitely throwing some money your way)

    Can you add to your list showing the ‘title’ of a text widget in the custom widgets home page? this would make it much simpler for custom widgets that I have done to know what they are.

  • Jay - 31 Aug 2009 10PM

    WP 2.8.4

    I’m seeing the same issue as Suzie and others that ‘Text’ Widgets are not displaying their titles in the admin panel

    Additionally her fix did not solve my problem.

  • Jay - 31 Aug 2009 10PM

    @Nadeem Aslam

    I had this issue as well and the only way I could solve it was to ‘Rest all widgets’ from the main TS Custom Widgets panel.

    It was a pain to reconfigure all the widgets, but it did solve the problem.

  • Ken - 10 Sep 2009 5PM

    Hi,
    I’m having the same problem as mentioned before… With a static page chosen for the Blog (i.e. “Blog”), Custom Widgets doesn’t seem to be able to assign a widget to only that page. Is there an update? Workaround? It works fine on any other static page. I’ll be happy to donate something once this is fixed :-) ) This is an awesome plugin in every other aspect!!!

  • Rui Santos - 15 Oct 2009 10PM

    Hello, i love your custom widget plugin and i’ve used it several times before without any problem but now i tryed using embed codes with text widgets to made custom ads and i faced a problem, the embeded object show perfectly in the home page but they stay blank in any other page where i try to show them. I’m not sure if your plugin is the cause but it’s the only thing different and before the swf files were showing no matter wich page i was seeing. Appreciate if you can help me. Even you saying that it’s not from your plugin is a big help, that way i know i must look into some other thing.

    Thanks in advance,

    Rui Santos

  • Kevin Alvarez - 17 Oct 2009 12PM

    This is the second time I tried to comment. If it is duplicate, I am sorry.

    My question revolves around the efficiency of this widget/plug-in in cases where a 300-400 page site may incorporate a unique widget for each page.

    Will the plug-in be able to handle that many variable and if so, will it slow down the page load time.

    Thanks. Awesome plug

  • Jonah - 23 Nov 2009 4PM

    Thanks for this excellent plugin! I too am having issues with the title displaying in WP 2.8+ – I think it’s a problem with the way Wordpress handles widgets from 2.8 on.

    I was able to change line 66 in admin_template_main.php to this:

    echo !empty($wp_registered_widgets[$widget_id]['title']) ? $wp_registered_widgets[$widget_id]['title'] : $wp_registered_widgets[$widget_id]['id'];

    ….and now I actually get the generic title of the widget and the instance id but still no specific title. I’m not a PHP expert so I don’t really know what I’m doing, just messing around.

    Does anyone know how to get the specific title to display? That seems to be the only thing missing from this awesome plugin at the moment…

    Thanks,
    Jonah

  • Herko - 05 Dec 2009 11AM

    Hi,
    I’m having the same problem as mentioned before… With a static page chosen for the Blog (i.e. “Blog”), Custom Widgets doesn’t seem to be able to assign a widget to that page. Is there an update? Workaround? It works fine on any other static page. I’ll be happy to donate something once this is fixed ) This is an awesome plugin in every other aspect!!!

  • Sarfaraz - 07 Dec 2009 12PM

    Change line 60 of admin_template_main.php

    FROM

    $wp_registered_widgets[$widget_id]['callback'] == ‘wp_widget_text’

    TO

    $wp_registered_widgets[$widget_id]['name'] == ‘Text’

    The above change will display text widget title. I have tested this is 2.8

  • 509 Media - 10 Dec 2009 4AM

    thanks for the up. I will look into this. I have been wording how to make certain widgets show up where I want.

    Peace…

  • slacker - 10 Dec 2009 5PM

    Thank you Sarfaraz for finding a solution the text widget title problem with 2.8!

  • Herko - 31 Dec 2009 12PM

    If you check the box before ’show only on homepage’, it’ll ensure the block is shown on the page set as blog home. This is the solution to the issues with sites who have a static page set as their posts home page, while another static page is their site home page. The ‘home page only’ setting refers to the posts home page.

  • joe - 09 Jan 2010 1AM

    Hey thanks for this plugin! One day when I make money off my projects I will donate to you! Promise!

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