WordPress has a lot of advantages as a CMS for simple websites. The admin system is pretty good for non-techies to control their site content (adding posts, pages, uploading images are all pretty streamlined processes). However, one of the areas where it falls down is managing secondary page content.
It’s great if you’ve just got a basic template with just a single column of content, but if you have a design with multiple columns, or ‘sidebars’ with global widgets and you also want to include page-specific content in these areas it all gets a bit clunky. The widget admin area isn’t particularly user-friendly and just trying to explain it to clients highlights that fact. Getting ‘contextual’ with widgets is tough work if a site has more than about 5 pages…
So, step in this little plugin to add up to 5 additional content blocks to posts or pages.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/secondary-html-content/
You can pretty easily then just add a tiny chunk of code into your theme files to pull in this extra content to any part of the page design.
The only niggle I’ve got so far is it doesn’t seem to provide the usual ‘Visual and HTML’ view options in the secondary boxes – I know most people steer clear of the visual option but some clients are more comfortable with it once things are all set up by the developer.
This is just what I’ve been looking for on a current project. Did you ever find a way of editing the HTML though? I want to be able to specific HTML but can’t seem to do it easily. I can disable the visual editor in my user profile which seems to work…but doesn’t give me the flexibility I’m after. Any ideas?
On my installation I’m able to go into ‘HTML’ mode in the secondary panels – it doesn’t work in the same way as the main content editor but it does work and brings up an HTML version as a pop-up which can then be manually edited and saved. This was just using the standard installation for the plugin i linked to above…
Look for the ‘HTML’ button in the topbar of the secondary content panels.
Have a look too at http://keirwhitaker.com/archive/introducing-wp-blocks/ – a slightly different approach but might do what you need? (And this one’s by a Bath lad! Keir’s at Carsonified.)