Following on from my post about Widget Management Concepts, I have produced a new plugin with the aim of making it super easy to include widgets within themes without needing to be concerned with writing plugins, or code in functions.php.
To install the plugin just download it and activate it. It has no options.
Creating a theme widget really is very easy. Here is a step by step process.
Create a new PHP file in the theme and call it {something}.widget.php.
Add a PHP comment at the top of the file to indicate the name and description of the widget. Like this:
[php]
/*
Widget Name: 3 Random Posts
Widget Description: Outputs 3 random posts in a list
*/
?>
Add the code you want for your widget. In this example I am adding code to output three posts at random:
[php]
Note that this code is identical to the code you would insert into a theme file to do this manually. There is nothing special about this code that needs to be changed to make it a widget.
Assign the widget to sidebar.
On the left of the image is the output (there is only one post because it is a fresh installation) on the right the widget added to the sidebar.
You can download the plugin from WordPress extend.
I think that making it this easy to create, and more importantly understand, the widgets included with a theme opens up a lot of possibilities. For example, with this it would be easy to use a sidebar and widgets to offer different layouts for a featured post on the home page.
If you have any suggestions for improvements to the plugin itself, or ideas about how it can be used, let me know.
Can you paste the entire error in?
I'm getting the Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting '(' in error too.
I wouldn't recommend bundling plugins in with themes. Technically it is fine, but if the plugin is updated to cope with a new version of WordPress anyone using the theme would be stuck.
I completely agree with your rationale for this plugin. It would make modifying themes and reusing components in different themes a whole lot easier if the theme widgets could be isolated into their own files.
Is there any reason why this couldn't be adapted to the functions.php file that comes with a theme? I'm not quite sure how it might be accomplished in practice but I would love to use the features of the plugin without requiring the users of my theme to load the plugin.
Any pointers on where to begin?
Thanks for a great post, the plugin sounds of utility, I would want to give this a try.
Thanks for the step by step instruction would make it easy to get along on a fly..
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Kevin, that sounds like you are running on PHP 4. I haven't included PHP4 support in this plugin; although, I don't think there is anything in it that wouldn't run on PHP4 except the constructor itself.
If you amend public function __construct(){
to read
function fw_theme_plugins() {
then that might work. I haven't tested it though.
Hi – any reason this plugin might not work with WP 2.7? Getting the following error code when I try to activate it:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or '}' in /mnt/local/home/fmblogger/floridamortgageblogger.com/wp-content/plugins/fun-with-theme-widgets/fun_with_theme_widgets.php on line 31
[...] type of post (journal entry or photos) and as such had some extra code to output that. I used my Fun with Theme Widgets plugin to convert this to a widget and then attached it to the [...]
Great plugin!
It's a great way of collecting your favorite snippets of code you would normally use and all of a sudden..it's a widget!
A couple of minor issues.
1. I tested this out within a 'child' theme and I had to copy the php file to the 'parent' theme to get it to show up in the GUI.
2. After adding it to the widget section , I could not click on edit to remove it. I had to deactivate the plug.
I can imagine after adding many of these widgets, with the current GUI implementation of widgets in WP 2.7 will become quite painful. Perhaps WP 2.8 will make it better.
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[...] I found a new plugin for building Theme widgets called Fun With Theme Widgets [...]
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Monika,
Trackbacks are a nice idea, but in practice I got so much spam and so many one line links that it wasn't worth it.
I am happy for you to add your link in any comments here, especially when you are promoting something I have done :-)