Journal

I don’t consider myself a “theme developer”. I’m not spending months developing a bulletproof theme, reselling it and then providing continuous support for hundreds of users on Theme Forrest. Rather, I build custom themes that are tailored (fig 1.0) to my clients specifically. That being said, I don’t always give them access to “everything”…but one area I find they nearly always ask to take control of is the footer.

More often than not, the footers in my themes involve some dynamic content…like the date, and one or more references to bloginfo();. Well, if you’ve ever tried to pass PHP in a WordPress widget, you know the results aren’t pretty.

Solution

Here is a simple way to turn the WordPress default text widget into a PHP enabled widget…and it’s NOT a plugin!

	add_filter('widget_text','execute_php',100);
	function execute_php($html){
    	if(strpos($html,"<"."?php")!==false){         	
                ob_start();         	
                eval("?".">".$html);
        	$html=ob_get_contents();
        	ob_end_clean();
     	}
	return $html;
	}

Explanation

I originally found this code over at Emanuele Feronato’s blog, where he has written up a very detailed explanation of what this function is doing. So, for the sake of time I’m going to redirect you there if you want more information: Executing php inside a WordPress widget.