Adding A Dynamic Widget To Your Post Content

Having a dynamic widget in your blog’s sidebar makes it really easy to add, remove and edit various different features. But did you know that you can also add those widgets into the actual post of your blog? It takes a bit of coding to get it working correctly but it can really add a lot of extra function and features to your blog post that you might have not had before. Adding the dynamic widget to your blog post allows you to display a calendar, recent posts list, recent comments list, tag cloud and more.

In order to get this working correctly we are going to need to edit 2 files; single.php and functions.php.

Adding the code to single.php

To get the dynamic widget to display in the post content you need to modify your single.php file and place the code where you would like the widgets to display. Typically the php code to display your blog post looks like…

<?php the_content(); ?>

You may find that when you go to modify single.php that there is extra code inside of the ( ). This is normal and will not affect anything. If you want the dynamic widget to display directly after the post content you need to place the following code directly after the above PHP code.

<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar(2) );?>

Now that you have that piece of code added into your single.php file it is time to work on adding in the actual code that registers the new widget section.

Adding the code to functions.php

The functions.php file exists in the same directory that single.php is in. It’s possible that your theme may not have a functions.php file and if it doesn’t you can always create one. So to get started go ahead on open up functions.php or create it if need be.

If your theme already contains a dynamic sidebar or you are using the Default theme that comes with a WordPress installation look for the following code…

<?php
     if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
        register_sidebar(array(
            'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
            'after_widget' => '</li>',
            'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
            'after_title' => '</h2>',
        ));

That code will be the first thing you see opening up the functions.php file inside of the Default theme folder. So to get the dynamic widget to display in our blog post you have to add basically the same piece of code.

register_sidebar(array(
    'name' => 'Post Widget',
    'before_widget' => '',
    'after_widget' => '',
    'before_title' => '',
    'after_title' => '',
));

Yes, there is an extra line of code in there I know. All that this does is name the widget so that when you are adding things to it in the WP Dashboard you can easily recognize which widget you are using.

See? Pretty snazzy huh?

Ok, for those of you that might be lost I will post up what the finished code should look like.

<?php
     if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
        register_sidebar(array(
            'name' => 'Sidebar',
            'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
            'after_widget' => '</li>',
            'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
            'after_title' => '</h2>',
        ));
register_sidebar(array(
    'name' => 'Post Widget',
    'before_widget' => '',
    'after_widget' => '',
    'before_title' => '',
    'after_title' => '',
));

That should do it. You will notice that I added a name to the actual sidebar itself as well. This isn’t something that you have to do but it just makes it a little bit easier to know which section of widgets you are messing around with. You can then go into your WordPress Dashboard, click on Design then on Widgets and begin adding widgets into your blog post by selecting the Post Widget in the drop down list.

This type of post can be somewhat confusing especially when you have a theme that doesn’t use a dynamic widget at all. If you have any problems getting this to work with your theme you are more then welcome to leave a comment below or send me an email and I will see what I can do to help!