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!