chrisguitarguy

<p>Arbitrary Sidebars allows you to add widget areas via an page in the WordPress admin area. What you do with those sidebars on the front end is up to you and your theme.</p>
<p><strong>This plugin requires PHP 5.3+</strong>. Please check your server configuration before installing.</p>
<p>Some use case ideas:</p>
<ul>
<li>The end user wants to associate sidebars with individual posts and pages. This plugin ould provide half that functionality: easily creating widget areas.</li>
<li>You need reusable content blocks and want to take advantage of the widget system.</li>
</ul>


Arbitrary Sidebars

Cedaro

Brady Vercher

<p>Designed for simplicity and flexibility, Simple Page Sidebars gives WordPress users, designers, and developers the ability to assign custom sidebars to individual pages–without making any template changes. Existing sidebars can also be assigned in quick edit and bulk edit modes, helping save you time.</p>
<p>In contrast to some of the more complicated plugins available, Simple Page Sidebars aims for basic, core-like functionality and integration that’s easy to use without polluting your admin panel. And due to the way sidebars are saved, it utilizes built-in WordPress caching, so your site won’t be bogged down with additional queries.</p>
<p>Simple Page Sidebars also ships with a “Widget Area” widget for pulling all the widgets from one sidebar into another.</p>
<h3>Benefits</h3>
<ul>
<li>No more site-wide, generic sidebars. Each page (or section) can have its own widgets.</li>
<li>Complete control over the names of your custom sidebars.</li>
<li>Assign the same sidebar to multiple pages.</li>
<li>Modify a page’s sidebar without creating an unnecessary revision.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Advanced Usage</h3>
<p>If you want to assign custom sidebars to archive pages or replace multiple sidebars per page, this plugin likely won’t be the best solution. However it’s flexible enough to handle a wide range of page-based use cases. It can even be configured to work with Custom Post Types by adding a couple lines of code:</p>
<pre><code>function myprefix_init() {
    add_post_type_support( '{{post_type}}', 'simple-page-sidebars' );
}
add_action( 'init', 'myprefix_init' );
</code></pre>
<h3>Additional Resources</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/simple-page-sidebars#postform" rel="ugc">Write a review</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/cedaro/simple-page-sidebars" rel="nofollow ugc">Contribute on GitHub</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/cedaroco" rel="nofollow ugc">Follow @cedaroco</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.cedaro.com/?utm_source=wordpress.org&utm_medium=link&utm_content=simple-page-sidebars-readme&utm_campaign=plugins" rel="nofollow ugc">Visit Cedaro</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Notes</h3>
<h3>Custom Loops</h3>
<p>If your page has any custom loops or queries, they need to be followed by <code>wp_reset_query()</code>, otherwise the global <code>$post</code> variable will no longer reference the correct post and by the time the sidebar is displayed, Simple Page Sidebars won’t know which page is being viewed, possibly leading to an unexpected sidebar being displayed.</p>
<h3>Theme Sidebars</h3>
<p>Some themes register different sidebars for their page templates, which means there isn’t a default sidebar that can be replaced. To use Simple Page Sidebars in this instance, you can create a child theme and force page templates with custom sidebars to use the default sidebar.</p>


Simple Page Sidebars

Initially I was disappointing it didn't work on custom post types, but then bothered to read the instructions.
The developer had bothered to put down exactly how to do this:
function myprefix_init() {
    add_post_type_support( '{{post_type}}', 'simple-page-sidebars' );
}
add_action( 'init', 'myprefix_init' );
Works a treat! Very flexible. Great job.



Works great

Easy to understand how to use it and does exactly what it says. Great plugin.



Works great!

Easily assign custom, widget-enabled sidebars to any page.

Arbitrary Sidebars vs Simple Page Sidebars