Sidepipe for Craft CMS
Installation
Requirements
| Craft CMS | 5.3 or newer |
| PHP | 8.2 or newer |
| Extensions | none beyond Craft's own |
| Database | any Craft supports — Sidepipe adds no tables |
Sidepipe has no build step, no front-end assets on the public site, no queue jobs and no outbound requests. The one asset it ships is a small stylesheet, loaded in the control panel and only on pages that actually pipe something.
Install
composer require justinholtweb/craft-sidepipe
php craft plugin/install sidepipe
Or from the Plugin Store: search for Sidepipe, install, done.
There is no post-install step. Nothing changes anywhere until a field layout asks for it.
Verify
Open any field layout designer — Settings → Entry Types → any type, say — and look in the UI elements library on the right-hand side. There should be a Sidebar element next to Heading, Tip, Markdown and the rest.
If it isn't there, the plugin is installed but disabled. php craft plugin/enable sidepipe.
What gets written
Sidepipe stores nothing of its own. The plugin's five settings live in project config under
plugins.sidepipe.settings, like any plugin's; the sidebar arrangement itself lives in the field
layouts, as a SidebarMarker layout element among the fields it sits with.
There is no migration and no schema, so there is nothing to roll back.
Uninstalling
php craft plugin/uninstall sidepipe
composer remove justinholtweb/craft-sidepipe
Every field goes back to the content pane. The field layouts themselves are untouched apart from the Sidebar markers, which Craft drops along with the plugin that owns them — so the arrangement is lost and nothing else is. Tabs that piped by name simply start rendering normally.
Reinstalling and re-adding the markers puts everything back; no content is involved at any point.
Multi-environment notes
The arrangement travels in project config with the field layouts, so it deploys the way the rest of
your content schema does. If allowAdminChanges is off in production — as it should be — you build
the layout in development and php craft up applies it, same as any field layout change.
One thing to watch: because the markers are plugin-owned layout elements, an environment that has the field layouts but not the plugin will silently drop them from its copy of the config the next time those layouts are re-saved there. Install Sidepipe everywhere the project config goes.