Conditional WordPress widgets with rich editable text

For the "About Joost" widget shown on the homepage of this site, I created a new widget. It has two great features: it shows just on the homepage, and the content and title are drawn from a page, so that I can edit it as a normal page with the richtext editor in the backend of WordPress.

The code basically looks like this:

[source language="php"]
function widget_about_me($args) {
if (is_home()) {
extract($args);
query_posts('page_id= ');
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
echo $before_widget;
echo $before_title.get_the_title().$after_title;
the_content('');
echo $after_widget;
endwhile;
query_posts('');
}
}
[/source]

The is_home() makes sure the widget only shows up on the homepage, and then you enter into a new loop with a specific page id. After having done that, I open the "normal" loop again, to make sure other widgets and stuff that relies on is_home() keeps working.

Of course you have to make sure that you 301 redirect the "page" you're using in the widget when it get's opened directly to your homepage. There's no reason for anyone to want to see just that content.

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