Simple widgets logic

[MilenKo]

Hey everyone. I am at a stage of code cleaning for my first PW profile where I decided to implement some sidebar widget logic that would allow me to remove code repetition. I read about a few widget logic approaches that were working fine but that seemed too complicated for my needs so decided to implement something really simple that would do just that - widget logic that can be changed through the admin but not through code editing.

So before I share my idea, I would give you some info of the structures I have:

-- Recipes
---- Child 1
---- Child 2
-- Ingredients
---- Child 1
---- Child 2
 

So in my project needs, I wanted to have a solution that would allow me to set through the profile admin one or group of widgets per template (it would allow unlimited widgets as far as I have the code for it).

So to achieve this functionality, I took the following steps:

1. Create a template, called widget_logic and set the allowed template for children to be itself (widget_logic)
2. Create a page Site Widgets and assign to it the widget_logic template.
3. Create a field called listing_widgets and set its type to Page Reference.
4. In Details tab select Multiple Page Array to allow multiple widgets to be selected.
5. In the input tab chose Page Auto Complete as input field type.
6. In Selectable pages point the parent to your widgets page name (Site Widgets in this example) and set the widgets_logic as the template.
7. Repeat the steps 3-6 creating another field: inner_widgets (this would allow you to have different widgets per listing template and inner page )
7. Add manually the child pages with the widgets names in Site Widgets page you just created.
8. Assign the fields to the parent templates that you want the widgets to be pulled from (in this case: Recipes, Blog etc.)
9. In the template code, pull the page parent through API using the loop you use to list the results in the page. For this tutorial I will set the widgets to Recipes template that shows a listing of all the recipes matching my criterias:

//Build a selector and limit page results to 5
$result = $page->children("limit=5, sort=-published");

//Pull the parent of the first child-page to be used for widget logic
$parent = $result->first()->parent();

10. Once we know the parent and we know the field names assigned to it containing the widgets, we use a simple loop in each template to get the selected widgets name and include them where needed. Note, for the widgets naming I used: widget-XXX-YYY.php (eg. widget-recipe-top.php). If you prefer other naming, make sure you change the include line to match the new names.

//Loop through all the widgets setup in the parent template
foreach ($parent->listing_widgets as $w) {    

//Including all the widgets by file name and order set in the parent widgets field    
include ('./includes/widget-' . $w->title . '.php');

11. In the Recipe-inner template I would do the same:

$parent = $page->parent();
//Loop through all the widgets setup in the parent template
foreach ($parent->inner_widgets as $w) {    

//Including all the widgets by file name and order set in the parent widgets field    
include ('./includes/widget-' . $w->title . '.php');
}

NOTE: in the inner page template I changed the field name to inner_widgets to pull the widgets for the inner page.

12. Now all that is left is to assign the two fields to every parent and/or inner page template that you would like to use the simple widget logic and select the widgets for each one.

It might not be the best approach, however it is super simple to setup and allows me to have different widgets on any template now. The variety of widgets could be extended at any time by just adding the new widget, create the page with the name for it and assign it to the chosen template. Having the Page Auto Select field would allow you to drag and drop the widgets to reorder them so it suited my needs perfectly. Hope it would for you as well. Any code improvements are more than welcome (as usual

P.S. On the image of widgets view, I set the size of both fields to be 50% so that they show up on the same line and save the space and scrolling.

[MilenKo]

I am starting to think that this approach can be used to widget-ize a profile completely if the widget names are descriptive and their code inserted in the right spot. I have had a theme for WordPress where initially there was nothing on the main page but a bunch of widgets and a big list of widget areas to insert them. Sky is the limit, but some more extent might be needed for the things to work perfectly  Will try to take the approach on next project and see how it goes...

[MilenKo]

After rethinking the Simple Widget Logic mechanism, I decided to try to unify the sidebar code, so that it can be included on every template where a need is. To make it work for all my listing and inner view templates, I needed to add some more logic to it. So here are the extra steps I took to make it happen:

1. All page listing template selectors variable was made identical (in the example bellow I am showing the change for Recipes parent template):

before:

//Build a selector and limit page results to 5
$recipes_list = $page->children("limit=5, sort=-created");

after:

//$list variable would be used for every parent template to unify the sidebar query
$list = $page->children("limit=4, sort=-created");

2. Removed the $parent selector from every template.

3. Changed the variable in the page rendering code from $recipes_list to $list.

4. Copied the code for the sidebar and put it in a separate file, called _sidebar.php in the main template folder. In the sidebar I had the logic now:

<div class="col-md-4 col-lg-3">
	<aside>
		<div class="side-bar">											
		<?php
			//Check if the present page has children
			if($page->hasChildren()) {
				//Grab the parent from $list and set the widgets source to listing_widgets field
				$widgets = $list->first()->parent()->listing_widgets;
			} else {
				//If the page is a child, grab the parent and set the widgets source to inner_widgets field
				$widgets = $page->parent()->inner_widgets;
			}
			//Loop through all the widgets setup in the parent template
			foreach ($widgets as $w) {	

			//Including all the widgets by file name and order set in the parent widgets field	
			include ('./includes/widget-' . $w->title . '.php');
		} ?>														
		</div>
	</aside>
</div>

5. Included the _sidebar.php in every template (listing and inner):

<!-- Sidebar -->
<?php include ('./_sidebar.php') ?>
<!-- Sidebar -->

 

And voila, now the sidebar markup is unified and depending on which template is rendered the $parent is pulling its name and then all the widgets selected in the parent field are applied.

An improvement would be to make the system work with a delayed output, but I am not yet there. Hopefully I will switch to it in my profile v. 2

Note: There is only one issue I see with this approach - if I decide to move the _sidebar.php to the include folder where all the widgets resign, changing the path of the widgets to:

include ('./widget-' . $w->title . '.php');

works only for the parent template, but not for the children. While browsing the children pages, it shows that the widgets path is not found. That is why I had to move the _sidebar.php to the main templates folder so that the path is working for both. Maybe someone knows a way to have that fixed so that I could move the sidebar file back to /includes/ folder?

[MilenKo]

Guys, I just edited the sidebar code as I noticed that both templates (listing and inner) were pulling the widgets from listing one only. Besides that I removed the $parent variable and inserted its value in the $widgets that now holds the proper query to listing or inner depending on the fact if the page is the parent or a child. Now it is working fine and the code got a bit shorter