The WordPress plugin Custom Sidebars is a valuable and powerful plugin and can help site owners and editors create custom experiences across their websites. Myself and others I work with were confused by the UI of the admin area of the Custom Sidebars plugin and its convoluted setup workflow so I thought I’d document my process in hopes that it would help others take advantage of this great piece of open source programming. For this example, I walk through the process of how to show custom sidebar content on all posts in a particular category. The example I use is the ‘Mountain Festival Promo’ sidebar for every post in the ‘Mountain Festival’ category.

Installing:

Drag the plugin folder to wp-content/plugins NOT wp-content/[activeTheme]/plugins. Whew. I actually had to read the readme.txt for that one. From your plugins admin page, activate the Custom Sidebars widget.

Configuring:

Once Installed, you should see a Custom sidebars item under your Appearance menu in the admin area.

First step is to select which existing sidebars you want to be able to override. I have 26 on my site, but there are only 3 main ones that I’m working with, so I select those three and click the ‘Save Changes’ button just below. I know that single posts on my site use the Home sidebar by default so I make sure that’s one of the ones I select here.

Next, I create a New Sidebar in the area named just that. Clicking the ‘Create Sidebar’ button below will make it appear on the ‘All the Custom Sidebars’ list just below that. This will create a new sidebar that will show up on the right side of the Apprearance > Widgets admin page.

To configure the new custom sidebar, go to Apprearance > Widgets or click on the ‘Configure Widgets’ link towards the right of the ‘All the Custom Sidebars’ list.

On the Widgets page, click the expanding button on the right of your new sidebar area to expand. Your new custom sidebar should appear at the bottom of available sidebars. Drag and drop one of the available widgets over to the sidebar and it should pop open to allow you to enter values for its custom parameters. I’ve dragged a simple image widget for this example, but you can drag as many different widgets as you need to the sidebar.

Now you’re ready to create a filter. Go back to the Custom Sidebars admin page under the Appearance menu item. Once you’re there, click on the Default Sidebars tab. I know that single posts normally use the ‘home-right’ sidebar. So, under the ‘Mountain Festival’ category, using the ‘home-right’ dropdown, I select ‘Mountain Festival Promo’.

This effectively overrides the Home sidebar for every post categorized as ‘Mountain Festival’ and replaces it with the ‘Mountain Festival Promo’ one. Click ‘Save Changes’ at the botttom left and you’re finished. Browse to a post in that category and you should see the new custom sidebar in place. Awesome!

Huge thanks to marquex who wrote this plugin.

Feel free to post any questions or corrections in the comments section.