Creating a widget that displays the content of a page

Question

I have a page that displays information from a query (I placed the output of the query in a custom page template and have the information display that way). How can I put this information into a sidebar widget? Do I need to pull it from the page, or is there a widget that allows you to put a dynamic query inside?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you hard-coded your custom query directly in the page template, then you're going to need to duplicate that custom query in a custom Widget.

On the other hand, if you've abstracted the custom query (either into a template-part file, or better yet, a custom function), then you can simply include the template-part file or custom function in your custom Widget.

Answer 2

I'd solve this using the Text Widget.

Enabling shortcodes for it:

add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode', 11);

And then, as Chip Bennett points out, using a custom shortcode function that will output your custom query.