big potential but not quite ready…

  • Awesome potential. My big frustration: There does not seem to be any obvious way to install as sidebar widget, although the plugin appears to insist that this can be done “in seconds.” For the life of me, I can’t see how it’s done at all. Instead, contextly sticks a gigantic gray box at the bottom of posts. The functionality is kind of cool but the aesthetics leave something to be desired.

    I’m certain the intention is for maximum flexibility but, at the moment, something big and obvious is missing. What that is, I have no idea. Hope the contextly guys figure it out soon, though!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author rsingel

    (@rsingel)

    Hi Skipperdoodle,

    I missed this when you first posted this. Since your review (which is fair), we’ve added very different displays that are responsive and very easy to customize.

    As for sidebars, we’ve tried to clarify this a bit. What WordPress calls sidebars is different from what we do. The sidebars in Contextly live in the body of individual posts, not in the siderails.

    You make these inside an individual post using one of the buttons in the Visual or Text editors.

    We’ve made a lot of progress since you last tried us out, and would love to see what you think now.

    Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but does that mean these sidebars have to be added manually to posts? I clicked “Enable Auto-Sidebars” in the “Big Settings.”

    It does not seem as easy as the links after the post content, which just start appearing once the plugin is configured. I may well have missed it, but I looked, and could not find an explanation as to how this works. Any help would be appreciated. Cool service!!

    Plugin Author rsingel

    (@rsingel)

    Hey Matthew,

    There’s two kinds of sidebars in Contextly.

    The first is manually created and inserted in a specific post. These only include the stories you choose. You can also then later re-use these. You create these using the button on the Visual or Text editor. You can move them around and also edit them (simply highlight the shortcode and then press the edit button).

    The “auto-sidebar” works a bit differently. When you turn this on, you’ll see a short-code whenever you start a new post. You can move this where-ever you like in a post. This will contain related stories chosen by our algorithms. The number of stories in that sidebar is controlled by the auto-sidebar settings.

    Automatically adding sidebars into all posts, including older posts is something we are looking at, but it’s significantly more involved. For instance, there can be issues with older stories where existing multimedia content will be at the spot where the sidebar goes, making for an odd layout.

    – RS

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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