Shiba Widgets 1.5

The Shiba Widgets plugin allows you to assign different widgets to different posts, pages, categories, or tags.

Shiba Widgets 1.5 will only work on WordPress 3.0 and above.

[Full Shiba Widgets description.]

Shiba Widgets 1.5 is a big update with many new features. Make sure to test the plugin rigorously on a test site first before installing it on your main site. Please report any bugs you find here or in the main Shiba Widgets Plugin page.

1. Thumbnail Images

Thumbnail capabilities have been added to certain WordPress widgets as well as the Popularity contest widget. Expanded widgets include:

• WP Page Widget
• WP Recent Posts Widget
• WP Recent Comments Widget
• Popularity Contest Widget
  In order to add thumbnails to the Popularity Contest Widget, I first needed to standardize it based on the WordPress 2.8 WP_Widget object. This new standardized widget is called Shiba Popularity Contest and it contains thumbnail capabilities. It also has the added option of turning on or off the popularity ranking information.

There are various example thumbnail widgets in the widget areas at the top, bottom, and right of this page.

2. New Widgets

Several new widgets have been added:

• Shiba Tag Cloud
  The Shiba Tag Cloud is is similar to the WordPress Tag Cloud widget but it has the following added capabilities:
  1. Display all tags or only the tags from the current page.
  2. Choose how the tags should be displayed from a list of tag styles. These tag styles are based on the gallery frame styles used in the Shiba Gallery Plugin. In this way, you can synchronize both plugins to provide a consistent look. However, the Shiba Gallery Plugin is not required.
  3. Pick whether to size the tags based on the number of posts or whether to render them all in the same size.
  4. Show both post category and post tags.
  

  Example Shiba Tag Cloud Widget

Example Shiba Social Widget
• Shiba Social
  Allows you to add the following social networking buttons:
  1. Facebook Like button.
  2. Twitter button.
  3. Google +1 button.

Example Shiba Author Widget
• Shiba Author

  This widget shows the author gravatar information, the author description, as well as a link to author posts. You may set the gravatar image size and the maximum description length.

If you only want the basic Shiba Widgets functionality and do not want any new widgets, you can exclude all new widgets by going into Widget Set >> Options and un-checking the Include New Widgets option.

3. Expanded Widgets

Several existing widgets have been expanded so that there are more display options:

Expanded Recent Comments Widget
• WP Recent Comments Widget
  The WordPress Recent Comments Widget now groups comments together by post. It also has the following capabilities –
  1. By default, the widget will filter out the comments made by all blog authors (i.e., you). If you want to show blog author comments, check the Show Blog Author input.
  2. Set whether comment count should be shown. It is off by default.
  3. Specify maximum comment length.
  4. Add thumbnail images to the commented posts.

Example Archive Widget (Monthly and Yearly Type)
• WP Archives Widget
  Additional WordPress Archive Widget options include:
  1. Set whether post count should be shown.
  2. Set how you want to display your archives – monthly, weekly, yearly, day by day, post by post (posts ordered by date), or alpha (same as post by post but ordered by post title).
  3. New monthly and yearly option. This shows the links of the current year by month, but all previous year links are shown by year.
  4. Set number of links to display. This does not apply to the monthly and yearly option.

If you only want the basic Shiba Widgets functionality and do not want any expanded widgets, you can exclude all expanded functionality by going into Widget Set >> Options and un-checking the Include Expansion Widgets option.

4. Add Shiba Widgets to New Custom Post Types

Thanks to Greg Bellucci, Shiba Widgets can now be easily added to custom post types. Simply include ‘shiba-widgets’ in the supports attribute of your register_post_type function.

This will add the Shiba Widget metabox to the Edit screen of your post type object. You can also specify a widget set for all post type objects through the Widget Set >> Options screen.

5. Switch Themes Based on Widget Set

You can now set which theme you want to assign to a particular widget set. This will allow you to easily edit and change widget sets from different themes without actually doing a manual theme switch from the Appearance menu.

The plugin can also change themes on a page by page basis in your WordPress blog based on its assigned widget set. You can turn on this functionality by going into Widget Set >> Options and checking the Switch Theme Based on Widget Set option.