I have wondered about being able to display different sidebars before, conveniently I suppose  is the keyword here, as I know full well that this can be achieved with custom templates and managing a theme code and design but didn’t know that there was a plugin for that. At least until today (hat tip to Andy Beard the Internet business System man for the find).

Turns out that their is an easier way to make posts or pages (or even Tags and Category pages) display a custom sidebar, or at least a custom set of widgets in the preconfigured sidebar set via a WordPress plugin called Shiba.

The usual method of installation is used with the plugin added to the WordPress plugins folder and activated via the admin panel and once this is done the admin of the widgets is quite simple.  Indeed, reading through the Shiba Sidebar Plugin site the plans for future development are quite interesting with widget exports and better widget management options that will no doubt come in very handy in the future.

Word of warning at the time of writing, the developer says that the current version is fine for WP 2.9.2 but if your playing on WP3.0 hes aware of bugs and issues and is working on a fix. Thanks ShibaShake and keep up the good work.

You can custom grab the WordPress custom sidebar plugin here.