Edit sidebar content as a page in WordPress

Colin Temple — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:16:27 +0000

I recently came across a situation where I needed to display the contents of a page in a WordPress sidebar. Essentially, my client needed an easy way to edit a sidebar that appeared on multiple pages. Editing a Text widget wasn’t an option: they needed the flexibility of editing a page.

It took a few tries/revisions to find the best way to do this, so I thought I’d share my solution. All I did was create a page with a specific slug (“sidebarpage”) and echo its content. I used it in a sidebar widget, but you could use this anywhere in your WordPress Theme if you’d like to have an additional editable area.

$sidebarpage = new WP_Query(“pagename=sidebarpage”);
while($sidebarpage->have_posts()) : $sidebarpage->the_post();
the_content();
endwhile;
?>

Be sure that you’re creating a seperate WP_Query object ($sidebarpage in this example) — otherwise you’ll modify the query on the page itself, and your sidebar content will show up in the main body of your posts/pages as well!

The down-side of having this content stored in a page is that the page will appear in page listings, so be sure to exclude it if these are used in your theme.

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Edit sidebar content as a page in WordPress