Ben Byrne

kenjigarland

Xavier Serrano

Anything you can do with a widget can now be done inside your menus!
Widget Menuizer makes WordPress menus even more powerful, allowing for easy creation of custom “mega menus” and other fanciness without completely overhauling the menu management system into something unrecognizable.
Upon activation, navigate to the menu management screen under Appearance > Menus, and you’ll find a new option for Sidebars under the familiar Pages, Posts, Links, Categories and Tags list. Here, you can view all the sidebar regions that exist in your currently-active theme. Simply check a box to add a sidebar into your menu the same way you would for any other menu item.
Once in your menu, you’ll see a new option for “Container Element,” which specifies which HTML tag is wrapped around the sidebars that are output into the menu.
While running Widget Menuizer you also get the ability to define new sidebar regions right from the Appearance > Widgets admin screen (when using WordPress prior to 5.8, or 5.8 in conjection with the Classic Widgets plugin), so you can easily create new regions just for including in your menus without having to write any custom code for your theme.
Note for users of WordPress 5.8 and above: This plugin still works for injecting regions into menus, but you need to run the “Classic Widgets” plugin in order to create new Widget Areas via the admin.
Important: Because it’s possible to put menu widgets inside sidebars, you may see a warning notice if the sidebar region you’ve put in your menu contains a menu widget. This is because you may have inadvertently created a recursion: if the menu contained in your sidebar is the same menu your sidebar is placed in, you’ll have an infinite loop that will do bad, bad things. So be careful.
New in 1.0 Widget Menuizer now gives site administrators the ability to control the direction widgets flow within the menu, either horizontally or vertically.
New in 0.6: Widget Menuizer now provides a way for site administrators to create new Sidebars on the fly from the Widget admin! Now you can create new sidebars for use in your menus without having to edit your theme files or use some other plugin to let you register new sidebars.

Widget Menuizer

Unlock the full potential of the WordPress menu system to create mega menus and more by adding sidebar regions and widgets to your menus.

Ram Ratan Maurya

Codestag

This plugin adds a button to widgets area to create a new sidebar area which you can later use just about anywhere.
<h4>Usage</h4>
To display the sidebar with shortcode you can use <code>[stag_sidebar id="custom-sidebar"]</code> where <code>id</code> is the id of the sidebar that appears in the description area of the respective widget area. You can also pass an additional parameter <code>class</code> in shortcode to add class to the widget area wrapper on frontend.
<div class="embed-vimeo" style="text-align: center;"><iframe loading="lazy" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/86626101" width="750" height="422" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
<h4>Import/Export</h4>
We have added compatibility with <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-importer-exporter" rel="ugc">Widget Importer & Exporter</a>, which gives you the freedom to import and export custom widget areas when moving widgets from one site to another or backing up the widgets.
If you’d like to check out the code and contribute, <a href="https://github.com/mauryaratan/stag-custom-sidebars" rel="nofollow ugc">join us on GitHub</a>. Pull requests, issues, and plugin recommendations are more than welcome!
Checkout our finely tuned WordPress themes over at <a href="https://codestag.com" rel="nofollow ugc">Codestag</a>.

Stag Custom Sidebars

Create custom dynamic sidebars and use anywhere with shortcodes.

Widget Menuizer vs Stag Custom Sidebars