To use asides in the sidebar in wordpress, you can two ways. You could use a single category (outdated wordpress stuff alert) for your asides, where you keep the asides out of the main loop, and use multiple loops to display this category in the sidebar. You could also use the miniposts plugin, wich has the advantage that you could use multiple categories for your asides.

On ochblog we used the miniposts plugin (actually, we used version 2 of the plugin, wich is widgetized). This worked very fine, the editors would post minipost regularly, or promote other editors posts to full frontpage posts if they'd think it looked better there. All was going real well.

A few days ago however, one of the editors tought it would be real cool to use this plugin. It provides your blog with a form that allows subscribers of your blog to write posts, wich will be placed in a default category after being approved by an admin. If someone with post capabilities uses this form, it is placed without approval. So I put it on the site, looked at it for a day, and decided it should be altered so that everything wich gets submitted through this form, will be placed automatically as an aside. Question is; how to do this? Well, here comes the multiple loops thing in again.

So, I got rid of the miniposts2 plugin, built a second loop widget (we use a widgetized theme on ochblog), and edited the TDOMF options so it would put new posts in the asides category. Then I had to adjust the TDOMF plugin a little bit so it would place posts of registered users without admin approval (I decided that unregistered users posting on a blog isn't a good idea). I also got rid of a nasty bug where this plugin would produce some messed up admin pages if you used firefox in a rather brutal way. All the adjusted files are available for download here, I also included the sidebar widget I built. Beware, this widget is very basic, it will need some adjustments in the code in order to work on your blog. You'll also need to alter your main loop as described in the multiple loops link above. But it should be do-able if you have some experience with Wordpress templates.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 6:38 pm and is tagged asides, plugin, tdomf plugin, widget. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.