Back in January, I finally finished a plugin that I’d been meaning to get to for about a year: The Other Content. This made it possible to add a second content box to your edit pages below the standard primary content area, and then display content entered there by adding <?php the_other_content($post->ID); ?> to your theme files.
That was pretty useful (I know, because the reason that I finally finished it was that I needed it for a couple of projects), but there was room for improvement. What if you wanted more than two editable content areas on your pages? And what if you wanted to name the content areas to make it clear what content was supposed to go there? And wasn’t it confusing having an extra content box on all edit pages when it was only meant to be used on some of them?
The latest version of The Other Content, v2.0, addresses these points. Now you can create as many additional content types as you like, call them what you like, and have them appear on whichever edit pages you like. You can then choose which content is displayed where on your site by using <?php the_other_content(’Content Type Name’); ?> in your theme files.
The end result should be much more user-friendly. Before you might have had to enter legal disclaimers into the “The Other Content” box on some pages, a biography into the same box on another page, and leave the same box empty on your remaining pages. Now you can create two new content types, “Disclaimers” and “Biography”, and have a “Disclaimers” box appear only on relevant pages, a “Biography” box appear only on the relevant page, and no box at all on pages that don’t need additional content.
Hopefully you’ll find that the new plugin works well for you, but no doubt there’ll be things that need tweaking. As ever, if you use it then please let me know how you get on.