As with all WordPress sites, Widgets are a boon to Membership Site creators. Being able to pop in a bit of text or a list of links or whatever in the sidebar is one of the key factors to the flexibility that we all love and enjoy. Depending on your theme, you may have even more Widget options! As you can see on this page, I have two Widgets above, a couple on the side, and three below.

WordPress has some generic built-in Widgets that you can just plug and play, some plugins work with Widgets to share information in your sidebar, and you have an awesome “create-your-own” option with the versatile “text/html” Widget.

But how can you best utilize your Widgets? When I setup a new Membership Site, there are frequently Widgets that I want the general public to see (and not Members) and Widgets that I want members to see (and not the general public).

There’s a plugin for that!

There’s actually a few. The one that I use and love is called “Widget Logic“. This plugin adds a text field to your Widgets where you can insert a conditional tag. You can take that and run with it if you like, but I typically only use one conditional tag:

is_user_logged_in() or it’s reverse: !is_user_logged_in()

So, in this example, I’d use the first tag to tell WordPress to show that Widget only to members. I’d use the second tag to tell WordPress to show that Widget only to non-members – or at least, to anyone not logged in. Once the user logs in, the first Widget shows up and the second one disappears.

WishList Products has developed a plugin that takes Widget Logic and adds the option to limit Widgets by Membership Level. So you can have one Widget show for Gold Members and a different one show for Silver Members. It hasn’t been released to the public yet, but I’ve had the opportunity to try it out and love it!

Have you used Widget Logic? Comment below to let me know how it worked for you and what conditional tags you used!

Have you ever looked at the amount of plugins available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/? Wow! There seems to be hundreds of thousands (ok, I’m exaggerating slightly!) and if you search for a topic, you’ll find several that seem to do the same thing. So which one do you choose?

I tend to find people using WordPress that I trust and ask them what they use. I’ve been compiling lists of plugins that are recommended to me or that I’ve found useful and will start sharing them here.

While there are probably dozens that are “must-haves” for your WordPress site, I’m going to start off with three of my favorites – that I immediately install on every WordPress site that I create.

Page Link Manager
Can I just say I love this plugin? Page Link Manager is the best way to choose which pages show in your navigation bar. This plugin adds a link in the Tools section of your WordPress Admin site. When you click “Page Links” you are shown a list of all your pages. Just check the boxes next to the ones that you want to display on your site. Simple! And MUCH easier than editing the PHP code!

Flash Video Player
The day I discovered the Flash Video Player plugin I cried. Okay, not really. But it did solve a huge issue for me! To get videos to play on my websites, I was jumping through several hoops to get them to show up… and then was having issues getting them to play. Now I know there are services out there that you can pay for to simplify matters. But I’m a cheapskate! I didn’t want to pay $20 a month or so for the few videos that I use on my site. So I use this plugin to easily display my videos that are stored on Amazon S3. (I’ll post sometime exactly what I do from start to finish to get my videos online.)

Taragana’s Del.icio.us mp3 Player Plugin
I found Taragana’s Del.icio.us mp3 Player Plugin to play .mp3 files on the blog we did for my husband when he was in Iraq. I have yet to find a simpler audio file player plugin! The beauty of this plugin is that it takes all .mp3 files that are linked in your site and makes them playable with a small “Play” icon. The audio is also available for download by clicking on the link. It’s set for use with Deli.icio.us, but I’ve never used that part! I’ve tried other audio players and this one is the simplest and most “fix-it-and-forget-it” that I’ve found… and it works!

Obviously this is just a start! I’ll work through my plugin lists and share more with you soon. Start with these three and try them out on your site! Leave me a comment if you’ve used these and what you think about them!

~R