Built-in Sidebar Widget System for Forum Pages

Hi,

I wanted to make a suggestion that I think would improve ForumSpark for a lot of forum owners.

At the moment, if we want to have a sidebar next to the forum boards, we have to edit the theme layout and try to build it ourselves. I’ve actually been trying to add one to my own theme recently, but I haven’t been able to get it working properly.

Because of that, I think it would be really helpful if ForumSpark had a built-in sidebar widget option that could be enabled from the admin panel and would work across all themes.

For example, an option to enable a left or right sidebar on the forum page, and then choose which widgets appear there.

This could include things like:

• Recent Activity

• Users Online

• Recently Online

• Custom HTML or BBCode widgets

• Image widgets (for banners or announcements)

• Social media links

• Affiliate banners or partner links

A custom widget would be really useful so we could add things like social media links, affiliate images, announcements, or any custom content we want to show beside the forum boards.

Right now it seems like the only way to do this is through theme editing, which can be difficult and may break when switching themes. Having a built-in sidebar widget system would make things much easier and more flexible for forum owners.

Thanks for taking the time to read the suggestion.

This is already being worked on. But it’s too early to show anything. The idea is to improve the theming, widgets, page builder, etc. to bring a modular system. The way it is now indeed requires some knowledge of HTML, template editing, which isn’t ideal. I want FS to be user friendly and require little to no knowledge to build and customize a community.

Thanks for the suggestion. More info about this soon.

How about allowing users to drag-and-drop sidebar modules to reorder them however they want?

Cory said:

How about allowing users to drag-and-drop sidebar modules to reorder them however they want?

That is indeed the plan.

If there are any widget requests, feel free to let me know. I'm nearing completion with the widget manager.

Cedric:

If there are any widget requests, feel free to let me know. I'm nearing completion with the widget manager.

Yes. A new widget that allows you to put any content anywhere (almost). You just click "add a new widget" then choose what position on the page it should go (e.g. header, sidebar, after the question text) and what pages it should be displayed on (e.g. question pages, recent questions, user pages etc). Then enter whatever HTML you want. Widget Anywhere