Widget Context

Use Widget Context to show and hide widgets on certain sections of your site — front page, posts, pages, archives, search, etc. Use targeting by URLs (with wildcard support) for maximum flexibility.

Premium Support

Subscribe to our Premium Support service and get the PRO 🚀 version of the plugin for free when it’s launched! Your support enables consistent maintenance and new feature development, and is greatly appreciated.

Contribute

• Suggest code improvements on GitHub.
• Report bugs and suggestions on WordPress.org forums.
• Help translate to your language.

Documentation

Widget visibility can be configured under individual widget settings under “Appearance → Widgets” in your WordPress administration area or through the widget editing interface in the Customizer.

Target by URL

The “Target by URL” is a powerful feature for targeting sections of your website based on the request URLs. It was inspired by a similar feature in the Drupal CMS.

Use relative URLs such as page/sub-page instead of absolute URLs https://example.com/page/sub-page because relative URLs are more flexible and make the logic portable between different domains and server environments.

Wildcards

Use the wildcard symbol * for matching dynamic parts of the URL. For example:

• topic/widgets/* to match all posts in the widgets category, if your permalink structure is set to /topic/%category%/%postname%.

• page-slug/* to match all child pages of the page-slug parent page.

• Use a trailing ?* to capture URL with all query arguments such as utm_source, etc. For example, for every blog/post-slug also include blog/post-slug?*.

Exclude by URL

Specify URLs to ignore even if they’re matched by any of the other context rules. For example, enter example/sub-page to hide a widget on this page even when “All Posts” is selected under “Global Sections”.

1.3.3 (August 31, 2024)

• Mark as tested with WordPress 6.6 and PHP 8.2, see #72.

1.3.2 (April 27, 2020)

• Bugfix: Fix the Widget Context settings link in the widget controls after moving the settings under the “Appearance” menu for usability (closer to the widget settings).
• Feature: Add a link to the plugin settings in the plugin admin list, too.

1.3.1 (April 24, 2020)

• Bugfix: better support for URL rules with query parameters.

1.3.0 (April 23, 2020)

• Introduce the long-awaited “Exclude by URL” feature to prevent certain URLs from showing or hiding a widget when it’s matched by any other visibility rule.
• Introduce premium support to help maintain the plugin. Subscribe now to get the PRO version of the Widget Context for free when it’s launched!

1.2.0 (August 20, 2019)

• Set PHP 5.6 as the minimum supported version of PHP to match WordPress core.
• Developer tooling update: introduce PHP autoloading, PHP unit tests with proper mocking, linting for JS, switch to Docker inside a Vagrant wrapper for local development environment and update to the latest version of WordPress coding standards (see #50).

1.1.1 (June 9, 2019)

• Mark as tested with WordPress 5.2.
• Add test coverage reporting and remove Debug Bar integration since it wasn’t complete. Refactor plugin structure to support dependency integration. See #47.
• Added local development environment, see #48.

1.1.0 (June 13, 2018)

• Fix URL matching for URLs with query strings.
• Introduce unit tests for the URL context.

1.0.7 (June 5, 2018)

• Mark as tested with WordPress 4.9.6.
• Use the localisation service provided by WP.org.
• Support for Composer.

1.0.6 (January 20, 2018)

• Fix path to admin scripts and styles, props @tedgeving.
• Mark as tested with WordPress 4.9.2.

1.0.5 (May 8, 2017)

• Confirm the plugin works with the latest version of WordPress.
• Add support for continuous testing via wp-dev-lib.

1.0.4 (May 6, 2016)

• Confirm the plugin works with the latest version of WordPress.
• Fix the PHP class constructor warning.
• Move the widget context settings link.
• Fix the initial context state in the customizer.

1.0.3

• Include Russian translation (Thanks Flector!).
• Add textdomain to the remaining strings.
• Enable debugging if Debug Bar is available.

1.0.2

• Load available custom post types and taxonomies right before visibility checks to avoid PHP warnings.
• Run visibility checks only after the main post query has run. Fixes issues with WooCommerce.
• Load our CSS and Javascript files only on widget and customizer admin pages.

1.0.1

• Fix PHP warning in custom post type and taxonomy module.

1.0

• Public release of the 1.0 refactoring.

1.0-beta

• Improved settings page.

1.0-alpha

• Refactor code to allow custom widget context modules.

0.8.3

• Fix PHP warning that occurred on PHP 5.2.x.

0.8.2

• Improved SSL/HTTPS detection.
• Fix: Ensure that is_active_sidebar() & is_dynamic_sidebar() don’t return true when there are no widgets displayed on a page.
• Two new filters so that other plugins can override widget context display/visibility logic.

0.8.1

• Revert back to changing callback function in $wp_registered_widgets for attaching widget context setting controls.
• Fix the word count logic.

0.8

• Major code rewrite and refactoring to improve performance and usability.
• Fix bugs with URL targeting and empty lines in the “Target by URL” textarea.

0.7.2

• Fix PHP warnings/notices. Props to James Collins.

0.7.1

• Confirm that the plugin works with the latest version of WP.

0.7

• Bug fix: check for active sidebars only after $paged has been set.

0.6

• Don’t check for used sidebars on each widget load. Allow absolute URLs in the URL check.

0.5

• Added distinction between is_front_page() and is_home(). Remove widgets from wp_get_sidebars_widgets() if they are not being displayed — this way you can check if a particular sidebar is empty.

0.4.5

• Widget output callback couldn’t determine the widget_id.

0.4.4

• Fixed widget control parameter transfer for widgets that don’t use the new widget api.

0.4.2

• Initial release on Plugin repository.

• Search for Widget Context under “Plugins → Add New” in your WordPress dashboard.
• Widget Context settings will appear automatically under each widget under “Appearance → Widgets”.
• Visit “Settings → Widget Context” to configure the available widget visibility contexts.