The Easy Way to Add Widgets to WordPress Content

In my experience of building and maintaining WordPress web sites it is quite a common to want to put some related blocks of information into your main post’s or page’s content, inline. For example you might want to add a tag cloud or a list of related posts. This type of information is already available via WordPress widgets and of so you could add it to your sidebar (if you theme and template supported one). But what if you want to add the tag cloud into the middle of the post… like this;

Wow, pretty cool eh?

So this is possible today using my 5* rated Widgets on Pages plugin. With the plugin installed you can create a new Widgets on Pages sidebar, add your Tag Cloud widget to it, copy the generated shortcode and then paste that into your content. But now it’s even easier…

Introducing Turbo Widgets

I’ve recently created a new plugin for WordPress, called Turbo Widgets. And with this, WordPress widgets can be added to posts and pages using the nice WYSIWYG editor… click, click, click, BOOM!

There’s a free version of the plugin available on the WordPress.org plugin repository that has this nice GUI for adding widgets and there’s also a premium version that supports the ability edit the widgets too, again using the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor.

And Turbo Sidebars?

As well as this, the premium version also supports Turbo Sidebars. These are custom content areas that can hold standard WordPress content (text, images, etc) as well as widgets added through the Turbo Widgets features. These content areas can then also be added to posts and pages via shortcodes (soon through the WYSIWYG too) . You can also use template tags to add these Turbo Widgets to your themes templates, say for example adding related posts to the bottom of each blog page.

The documentation page for Turbo Widgets contains further info on how to use these, but I also hope to blog through their usage too in the near future.