As mentioned many times, one of the best aspects of using wordpress is its extendability.  If you are using wordpress to power your small business web site or blog, there are several plugins that are unavoidable.  Of course, it’s always a good idea to check out the wordpress most popular plugins page or to just Google for phrases such as top ten wordpress plugins.

In my opinion however there always seems to be one plugin missing from these top ten lists.  It’s a plugin that I cannot do without myself and which I have used in many a project.

I’d like to mention it here because I am sure that almost any above average wordpress user (business bloggers for example) needs the functionality this plugin offers.

I am talking about, the widget logic wordpress plugin, which is arguably one of my favorite wordpress extensions.

When this plugin is installed and activated,  a little ‘widget logic input box’ will appear in each widget that you are using (in the administration of wordpress of course !).
Depending on what ‘condition’ you place inside that box, wordpress will show or hide that specific widget in your sidebar.

The conditions that I mean are called wordpress conditional tags. These are PHP function calls with a certain variable passed by it.

For instance the is_page(‘evil’) line means that this calender widget will only be shown in the sidebar if the specific page with the title ‘evil’ is active.  Very simple isn’t it ? But very valuable as well.

So what this  widget logic plugin really does is provide the wordpress user with full control over which widgets are appearing where or when.

Another example : if you would like certain widgets to appear in your sidebar only when a post is shown that resides in  a certain category, then you could use the wordpress conditional tag named : in_category(‘name of category’). If you would like to have certain text widgets with specific information appear on the home page of your blog only, your would use : is_home() in the input box of that specific widget.

The possibilities are endless. So if you count yourself a serious wordpress user, go check this plugin out.  I don’t think you’ll regret it.