Content Aware Sidebars – Fastest Widget Area Plugin vs Get Custom Field Values

Content Aware Sidebars is the #1 WordPress Sidebar Plugin You can optimize conversion rates, boost on-site SEO, upsell products, and much more by displaying different widget areas on different conditions. Create tailored widget areas in seconds. No widget logic coding required. Show or Hide Widgets on Any Page (Yes, any) Replace your theme sidebars on different conditions, or insert widget areas with shortcodes. The following Display Conditions are available out of the box: Posts, Pages & Custom Post Types Content with Tags, Categories, or Custom Taxonomies Content written by select Authors Page Templates Blog Page & Post Type Archives Author Archives Taxonomy Archives Front Page, Search Results, 404 Not Found Page bbPress Profiles, Forums & Topics BuddyPress Profile Sections Languages (Polylang, qTranslate X, TranslatePress, Transposh, Weglot, WPML) Pods Pages You can even combine conditions in any way you like! E.g. target all posts in a select category and written by a specific author. Add Unlimited Sidebars & Widget Areas Create a post sidebar, a page sidebar, a category sidebar, or any custom sidebar you need – no coding required. CAS will never slow down your site, even if you create a lot of custom sidebars and conditions. Sidebars – Quick Select© lets you add or select widget areas directly when editing a post or page. Schedule & Disable Custom Sidebars In the All-in-one Sidebar Manager you just pick a start and end date for when widget areas should be displayed, and CAS will take care of the rest. 1-Click Sidebar Activation© lets you activate or deactivate widget areas instantly. The Most User-friendly Widget Manager When adding new widgets to sidebars, Live Search will find widgets instantly, and the smart split-screen makes it a joy to manage a lot of widgets and sidebars. The Enhanced Widget Manager adds the signature turquoise line to easily identify custom sidebars. Sidebar Plugin Integrations & Support CAS autodetects Custom Post Types and Taxonomies created by any plugin or theme. Built-in support for some of the most popular WordPress plugins means that you e.g. can create WooCommerce sidebars for select products or BuddyPress sidebars for your members. bbPress BuddyPress / BuddyBoss Easy Digital Downloads qTranslate X Pods Polylang TranslatePress Transposh Translation Filter WooCommerce Weglot WPML Customize Your Widget Areas Your Way Without writing any code, you can modify the HTML and CSS classes of widget areas, widgets, and widget titles. You get full control over the look and feel of your sidebars and widget areas, no matter what theme you use. Sidebar Visibility lets you elegantly hide any widget area for logged-out users. Complete control over your WordPress widget areas Upgrade to Content Aware Sidebars Pro and get these additional powerful features: Totem – Smart Floating Button Like the button you may have seen by Intercom or Helpscout, only this is for all your widgets Sticky Sidebars & Widget Areas Make any sidebar or widget area sticky without hurting site performance. No jQuery and no bloat Widget Areas after Paragraphs Display a widget area after a specific number or percentage of paragraphs in your content Even More Display Conditions Advanced Custom Fields data Meta Box data URLs + wildcards Referrer URLs Date Archives & Content by publish date BuddyPress Groups Random Widget Area Designer Add responsive widget columns and edit colors, backgrounds, paddings, etc. Widget Areas in Theme Hooks Intelligently infuse new widget areas into your theme without coding Automatic Widgets Backup Easily restore any changed or deleted widgets Widget Cleaner Save memory and remove clutter by disabling and removing unused widgets Extended User Visibility Show or hide widget areas for User Roles, BuddyPress Groups, and more Time & Weekday Schedule Display widget areas only in select time ranges on given days Container Widget Turn widget areas into reusable blocks and show the same widgets in different places Duplicate Widget Areas A real time-saver when adding new similar widget areas and so much more… Upgrade at anytime instantly and securely from your website’s Admin Dashboard. More Information Documentation GitHub Twitter

This plugin provides a powerful widget, shortcode (with shortcode builder tool), and template tags for easily retrieving and displaying custom field values for posts or pages. The power of custom fields gives this plugin the potential to be dozens of plugins all rolled into one. This plugin allows you to harness the power of custom fields/meta data. Use the “Get Custom Field” widget, the [custom_field] shortcode (which has a post editor sidebar widget to help you build the shortcode), or one of six template tags to retrieve and display custom fields. Find a custom field for the current post, a specified post, a recent post, or randomly. And for the custom field values found by the plugin, you may optionally specify text or HTML to appear before and after the results. If nothing is found, then nothing is display (unless you define text to appear when no results are found). If multiple results are found, only the first will be displayed unless you specify a string to be used to join the results together (such as “,”), in which case all will be returned. Visit the Examples section to see how this plugin can be cast in dozens of different ways. There are six template tags provided by this plugin. Here they are, with an explanation of when they are appropriate for use: c2c_get_custom() : Use this inside “the loop” to retrieve a custom field value for a post c2c_get_current_custom() : This is only available on the permalink post template (single.php) and page template (page.php). Can be used inside or outside “the loop”. Useful for using custom field to define text you want to include on a post or page’s header, footer, or sidebar. c2c_get_post_custom() : Useful when you know the ID of the post whose custom field value you want. c2c_get_random_custom() : Retrieve the value of a random instance of the specified custom field key, as long as the field is associated with a published posted, non-passworded post (you can modify a setting in the plugin file to search passworded posts as well). c2c_get_random_post_custom() : Retrieves the value of random custom field(s) from a post when you know the ID of the post you’re interested in. c2c_get_recent_custom() : Retrieves the most recent (according to the associated post’s publish date) value of the specified custom field. You can filter the custom field values that the plugin would display. Add filters for ‘the_meta‘ to filter custom field data (see the end of the code file for commented out samples you may wish to include). You can also add per-meta filters by hooking ‘the_meta_$sanitized_field‘. $sanitized_field is a clean version of the value of $field where everything but alphanumeric and underscore characters have been removed. So to filter the value of the “Related Posts” custom field, you would need to add a filter for ‘the_meta_RelatedPosts‘. Links: Plugin Homepage | Plugin Directory Page | GitHub | Author Homepage Developer Documentation Developer documentation can be found in DEVELOPER-DOCS.md. That documentation covers the numerous template tags, hooks, and shortcode provided by the plugin. As an overview, these are the template tags provided the plugin: c2c_get_custom() : Template tag for use inside “the loop” and applies to the currently listed post. c2c_get_current_custom() : Template tag for use on permalink (aka single) page templates for posts and pages. c2c_get_post_custom() : Template tag for use when you know the ID of the post you’re interested in. c2c_get_random_custom() : Template tag for use to retrieve a random custom field value. c2c_get_random_post_custom() : Template tag for use to retrieve random custom field value(s) from a post when you know the ID of the post you’re interested in. c2c_get_recent_custom() : Template tag for use outside “the loop” and applies for custom fields regardless of post. These are the hooks provided by the plugin: c2c_get_custom_field_values_shortcode : Filter to customize the name of the plugin’s shortcode. c2c_get_custom_field_values_post_types : Filter to customize the post types that should support the shortcode builder metabox. get_custom_field_values/can_author_use_shortcodes : Filter to customize if post author can make use of the ‘custom_field’ shortcode. get_custom_field_values/show_metabox : Filter to customize if the shortcode builder metabox is shown. The shortcode provided is [custom-field], which has a number of attributes to customize its behavior and output.