links to Media Library content in sidebar per page

Question

I have a bunch of PDF files in my Media Library and I want to show the relevant ones on a per-page basis in the sidebar. So on the 'About Cats' page, I want ILoveCats.pdf and cat-food.pdf from the Media Library to show up in the sidebar, but not dogsAreGreat.pdf. What would be the best way to do this? I'm using the Genesis framework if that helps. I would like for there to be an explicit connection between a file in the Media Library and the page(s) on which it shows up, so I'd prefer not to have just some hard-coded links in a template file with PHP testing is_page('blah').

Answer 1

Using the Download Monitor plugin allows me to categorize files, so I put my files in there instead of the Media Library. I organize files into categories based on which pages I want to display them. Then, I use a text widget with a custom shortcode to display files per category per page.

In my theme's functions.php:

// Enable shortcodes in text widgets
add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

// Custom shortcode:
add_shortcode('downloads_by_page', 'downloads_by_page');
function downloads_by_page($atts) {
    $atts = shortcode_atts(
        array(
            'pages' => array(),
            'category' => -1, // ID of a Download Monitor category
            'format' => '5' // ID of a Download Monitor output format
        ),
        $atts
    );
    $pages = $atts['pages'];
    if (is_string($pages)) {
        $pages = explode(',', $pages);
    }
    if (is_page($pages)) {
        // 'downloads' shortcode comes with Download Monitor:
        // http://mikejolley.com/projects/download-monitor/
        return do_shortcode('[downloads query="category=' . $atts['category'] .
            '&orderby=title&order=asc" format="' . $atts['format'] . '"]');
    }
    return '';
}

In a text widget in my sidebar:

// Category 3 refers to the ID of the Download Monitor category that has cat-related files
// Pages is a comma-separated list of page names or IDs
[downloads_by_page category="3" pages="About Cats,All Animals"]
[downloads_by_page category="4" pages="About Dogs,All Animals,Canine Facts"]