I currently have a widget that needs to be manually displayed on the front page. The rest of the pages it shows up in the widget sidebar, (this is accomplished with ‘Widget Logic’) but on the front page I need it to display in a different area. I tried using the_widget() but the issue is that it doesn’t display any of the saved data for the widget. How can I manually display the widget and get my saved data for the widget to display?
SOLUTION:
This is the code that ended up solving my problem. Basically you can retrieve widget data using get_option. I did a var_dump of the result and found the array that I wanted and fed it back into the_widget function. I guess the only issue here is if a user ever deletes the widget and remakes it, the array key will most likely change. But it works for now.
if(function_exists('the_widget')) {
$instance = get_option( 'widget_backspikewidget' );
the_widget('BackSpikeWidget', $instance[2]);
}
I like the answer you found, but I thought I’d tack on another.
You could create another sidebar area that’s only displayed on the front page, and then use the “Duplicate Widget” plugin to maintain two instances of a single plugin.
It has slightly higher overhead, but becomes much easier to maintain for someone who doesn’t code.