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.

marquex

The text widget that comes with WordPress is one of the its most useful features because of its power and flexibility. It admits HTML code but it is not very comfortable to code in that small box, so that is the reason because some WYSIWYG widgets were created some later, you can add images, and format the text easily.
But widgets are pieces of our sites intended to change some often, and it would be nice to have revisions, or upload images just for them, use shortcodes… cutting the story short, to handle widgets as they were posts.
Widget Entries plugin creates the Widget post-type in the administration area to make easier the edition of the text widgets, and also register a new widget to import the widget entries easily.
This way of working has many advantages:
<ul>
<li>You can format your widget with the WordPress editor.</li>
<li>You can upload images directly to be shown in your widgets.</li>
<li>You can have widgets drafts.</li>
<li>You can use shortcodes inside your widget.</li>
<li>You can get back to a previous version of your widgets thanks to the revision feature.</li>
<li>You can export your widgets contents.</li>
</ul>
And you have more benefits like using php scripts inside the widgets.
This is the best way to manage your widgets when your theme has several sidebars, or different sidebars for every page. I recommend to use the <a href="https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-sidebars/" rel="ugc">Custom Sidebars plugin</a> to create and assign sidebars to posts and pages.
This plugin uses the <a href="https://profiles.wordpress.org/users/vtardia/" rel="nofollow ugc">vtardia’s</a> <a href="https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/improved-include-page/" rel="ugc">Improved Include Page Plugin</a> to show the Widget posts. Thanks for his outstanding job.
Translations are welcome! I will write your name down here if you donate your translation work. Thanks very much to:
<ul>
<li>marquex – English</li>
<li>marquex – Spanish</li>
</ul>

Widget Entries

Widget Entries plugin creates the Widget post-type in the administration area to make easier the edition of the text widgets, and it also register a n …

Widget Menuizer vs Widget Entries