I’ve noticed there’s a lot of demand for sidebars.
Just take a look at Search results for 'category:feature sidebar' - Discourse Meta
We’ve already got a lot of plugin and Theme Component choices, but now we’ve deleted the Category column, wouldn’t it be nice if this was native and provided plugin outlets in the native sidebar(s), so adding widgets would be super easy?
There’s currently a lot of ‘reinventing the wheel’ going on
That is a good idea, but I am more interested in header and footer choices being a part of setup wizard in 2.3 cc @Johani
Pavilion has been happy to fill the gap here and has since released: Custom Layouts Plugin
Whilst there are many standalone, specific purpose sidebar addons what makes our system special is the level of flexibility and customisation.
This has our full support and there is an ever growing list of compatible widgets that all follow the same standard so can be laid out as the administrator desires.
There’s also a guide on how to create your own.
Note we have a plan to ship sidebar concepts as core components, one big change will be transitioning today’s “hamburger” to an on-demand sidebar. aka. (Sideburger) … @awesomerobot is working on the system design. We expect to ship in the next 3-6 months.
Sidebar is now official and shipped !