Lightweight Sidebar Manager

Description

Normally you have a sidebar that appears throughout the website. However, sometimes it is necessary to display a relevant, different sidebar on certain pages on the website. For an example: on WooCommerce pages, a sidebar with related or top seller products would be more relevant than latest comments, blog posts right?

This plugin helps you solve that problem as it allows you to create new sidebars and display them conditionally on certain locations of the website easily. Once the sidebar is created and displayed on pages you like, you can add relevant widgets in it.

Try it out on a free dummy site

Some of the Features:

  1. Create unlimited sidebars
  2. Place them any location your theme has defined (Footer Widgets / Left or Right Sidebar)
  3. Works with any theme
  4. Conditionally display sidebars on specific posts, pages, taxonomies or custom post types
  5. Display sidebars based on user roles

Screenshots

  • Add a New Sidebar from Appearance -> Sidebars -> Add New.
  • Give sidebar a name, Select a sidebar that is to be replaced and locations where the sidebar should appear.
  • Add Content to the newly created sidebar.

Installation

  1. Upload the plugin files to the /wp-content/plugins/plugin-name directory, or install the plugin through the WordPress plugins screen directly.
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress
  3. Go to Appearance->Sidebars to create new sidebars
  4. In Appearance->Widgets, you can add widgets in the newly added sidebar area.

FAQ

Which themes does this work with?

This plugin works with all well coded themes that have sidebar locations defined.

There are many other similar plugins. Why this?

Other plugins we found are heavy with ugly interface, non supported, developed only for specific themes or affecting performance. So we wanted to develop something simple & straightforward so we can recommend it users of our Astra Theme.

Reviews

30 Yennayer 2024 1 reply
It took jut a few moments to figure out how to use this plugin (just follow the instructions), but then it was very easy. And it allows us to personalize our site to a much greater degree than ever before. We use it most in conjunction with Product Filter by WBW plugin because we have many products and many categories--and as a customer navigates our site, we want certain filters to appear on ceratin pages. This Sidebar plugin made that super easy.
13 Yennayer 2023 1 reply
One of these simple things Wordpress doesn't offer yet. This plugin works and is easy to use.
20 Ibrir 2021 1 reply
The theme I am using to develop my website came with sidebars but they were not dynamic. After testing about 3 sidebar plugins, I was about to give up, then I found this one. It was very easy to use and works perfectly. I would highly recommend this plugin if you are looking for an easy way of incorporating sidebars on your website.
19 Yennayer 2021 1 reply
This does not work very well for me. It has some major issues. In order to set the sidebar for the pages/posts, you have to go to appearance > Astra options > sidebars. Then filter through four sets of options to get the sidebar where you want. For most people, this is not intuitive. It’s time-consuming and very confusing. Ideally, you should just go to the page you want to edit and select the sidebar you want on the page. Astra already has a settings area on the page where you can choose the location of the sidebar (left, right, none). It would make sense to then have some checkboxes below this to choose which sidebar you want to display on the page, instead of having to do it at appearance > Astra options > sidebars. But I understood some people like having control over all their sidebars in one place. For them, this plugin may be helpful, but it does not have filters to set the sidebar according to a specific category. The current process to set a custom sidebar is very confusing and time-consuming if you have a lot of pages/posts where you want to have different sidebars. I would like to request the Brainstorm Force team to add an option in the Gutenberg editor section from where we can select the sidebar we want for specific pages/posts. In this way, the plugin will be helpful for both types of people who want to have a master control to set sidebar at once and for the people, who want to set sidebar according to their pages/posts from the editor section itself.
Read all 19 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Lightweight Sidebar Manager” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Changelog

1.1.8

  • Fix: Sidebar rendering issue where specifying « All Singulars from {{category}} » resulted in incorrect display of « {{category}} – Category » after saving.

1.1.7

  • Fix: Added compatibility with WordPress v5.7 for jQuery migration warnings on admin page.

1.1.6

  • Improvement: Hardened the security of plugin.

1.1.5

  • Fix: Security hardening.

1.1.4

  • Fix: Fixed compatibility with other plugins with respect to the admin notice.

1.1.3

  • New: Users can now share non-personal usage data to help us test and develop better products. ( https://store.brainstormforce.com/usage-tracking/?utm_source=wp_dashboard&utm_medium=general_settings&utm_campaign=usage_tracking )

1.1.2

  • Improvement: Hardened the security of plugin
  • Improvement: Compatibility with latest WordPress PHP_CodeSniffer rules

1.1.1

  • Fix: Fixes a fatal error on Sidebar list page.

1.1.0

  • New: Target rules appearing in Display Rules column for sidebars.
  • Improvement: White Label can be set from wp-config.php file.

1.0.2

  • Improvement: Update target rules with support for targeting all posts inside taxonomies and terms.
  • Fix: If a taxonomy is used for multiple post types, it was not displayed in target rules.
  • Fix: Load correct textdomain and allow the plugin to be translated from translate.W.org

1.0.1

  • White Label support added from the Astra Pro plugin.
  • Optimized target rules query to be even more lightweight.

1.0.0

  • Initial release