Wordpress - making sidebar content editable

daymobrew

I am evaluating whether I can use Wordpress as a CMS for an upcoming project.
With any CMS, I've always been unsure how to include editable sidebar content. Obviously, the main section is easy to edit and I definitely don't want to hard code any content in the template and authors cannot be relied upon to put sidebar content inside a div with a certain class or id.

Using this college site as an example - what is a good way to set up the (left) sidebar stuff within Wordpress?

I've thought about the basic Text widget but that doesn't have a WYSIWYG editor like posts and pages have, so might be tough for the authors to maintain.

One thought I had was to create a 'sidebar' page (it would never be shown). Subpages would be set up to correspond to sidebar elements e.g. a 'contact' page content would have the address, the 'new courses' page would have a list of new courses.
The template would look for pages under the 'sidebar' page (get_pages) and insert their content in sidebar boxes.

Looking at existing plugins, WYSIWYG Text Widget sounds promising but apparently doesn't work in 2.7+. Rich Text Widget seems too new (version 0.2).

daymobrew

And I need the site to support English and Spanish. I was thinking of having 'en' and 'es' as top level pages and the header.php would have a link to the 'other' language, by looking at the url and substituting 'es' for 'en' and vice versa.

This does require the client maintains equivalent pages with identical slugs. Is this too much to expect?

dlofnep

Some themes allow you to manually configure the bars with wordpress, some don't. For some themes, you might have to go directly into your admin panel (or the raw source) and editing the appropiate files. It's usually something like "sidebar.php". It will usually have a few functions in it - printing out either a list of links, blogrolls or whatever.

daymobrew

I tried the Rich Text Widget and it has potential (though the editor doesn't provide for urls!).
I might use the Widget Context plugin to allow for different widgets appear in different languages (you can filter by url).