For many of the sites I do for clients, the designers will make pages with small pieces of text in various places. For example, the home page will have a headline, a tagline, and a small box with contact information. The about us page will have a main body of text, but then also a side box with a past client quote in it. The contact us page will have a short blurb before the form.
The client wants the ability to edit all of these pieces of text later on. Are pieces such as these what widgets are supposed to be used for? If so, how would I allow the client to update the text later on? It seems messy to make a separate widget area for every static page, and it doesn’t seem like this would allow the client to later edit the text very easily. Would concepts like custom post types, metaboxes, or shortcodes be useful here? I’ve tried many different methods but I’m not satisfied with any of them so far.
4 s
Typically you use widgets or custom post types but in reality these solutions can be unfriendly to clients. WordPress still revolves around the idea of a post based loop so doing traditional “content blocks” that you might find in other frameworks can be difficult. Fortunately there are plugins that are pretty good in this area.
I recommend checking out the following two:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/multiple-content-blocks/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-blocks/
