Widgets in WordPress are very powerful — allowing a great deal of flexibility in sidebars, widgetized home pages, and footer widgets (like we have in Genesis).
Sometimes you end up with a bunch of widgets with the same title (or no title)… and it can become difficult to tell them apart. Alternatively, you may just want an internal note on a widget… that’s not shown to users.
It’d be great if this was built into WordPress… but it’s not (yet?). Nor are there hooks to enable adding a field to all widgets… so are we stuck waiting?
Not exactly: there’s a workaround.
What we’ll do is add a filter to widget titles that hides our internal notes from users… but allows it to display in the backend.
Here’s the code to add to functions.php or a functionality plugin:
Note: Make sure you change example_ to a unique prefix for your theme or site!
To use it, just prepend your widget title with your note and a pipe “|” character (SHIFT + Backslash key).
Internal Note | Widget Title
Here’s the result:
Nick Ciske – CTO / CISO
Nick has a degree in Multimedia Design and over 25 years of experience working in web development and digital media. Nick specializes in architecting amazing and brilliant application solutions.