Put That Widget into a Post or Page

Posted on by Alan Levine

The Trick, Said Quick

Put the capabilities of widgets to work outside of sidebars and footers- set them loose in your pages and posts.

The Trick, In Intricate

Widgets are a handy way to organize and put dynamic content into your blog’s preset sidebars and footers. But why not let them do the same in perhaps a post or a page?

I’ve done this to display RSS feeds. or post tag clouds, but any widget that WordPress comes with or you can add with a plugin, can be yours too.

A few plugins are available to do this, I have used Widgets on Pages. After installing/activating the plugin, use its dashboard interface to add a new “Turbo Sidebar” merely a name for a placeholder widget area. I’m planning to add an RSS Feed to mine.

Give Sidebar a name, and note that you can copy the code here you can use when it’s time to insert in a Page/Post.

Creating a new sidebar named “Got Feeds” and showing that the shortcode to copy is [widgets_on_pages id=”Got Feeds”]… note that in my tests, the shortcode will not work .Copy the shortcode that shows up in the widget

Then navigate to your Widgets via the Appearance menu. You will see a new widget area is added that works like any other one- you can add any number of widgets you like here.

A new widget area is available

I added a text widget with some introductory text, and then used the RSS Widget to display the latest posts from one of the best blogs out there that still publish regularly.

Right now nothing will change on our site. But we now create a new page for where we might want to include an RSS feed. Write some text, set up a featured image, and add the shortcode that is in the top of the widget area– in my case it was

[widgets_on_pages id="1"]

and you might get a page on your blog with a full RSS feed like http://summerfun.extendlabs.ca/blogs-are-not-dead-yet/

If you prefer, here is a video from the plugin developer to walk you through the steps.

The Trick, Done Slick

The Trick, Give it a Kick

Tweet back a reply with an example you tried and/or how might you use this?

Featured dog trick image by Katrin B. from Pixabay