AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Overall I'm getting used to how Layouts and user controls are assigned to flesh out pages in the site. However I'm finding difficulty when it comes to content pages and sidebar content.

If I want to implement content pages as webpages, I can't use layouts and implement the layout sidebar(s). Because the sidebar content must always be a user control. There's no way to specify the sidebar in the layout should be webpage content and not a user control.

So far the only solution I can think of is to build a generic user control that accepts a webpageId as a parameter. Then I can build the sidebar content as another webpage and reference it within the user control and set the parameter value via the Layouts UI.

Are there any plans to improve this?

Try this
Create a new custom control in ConLib folder. Extend it from CommerceBuilder.UI.WebControls.HtmlContainer. Hopefully it will become available to be added to sidebars in Layout editor. You can set the Value parameter of this control which can be HTML content. The [[ConLib:XXX]] syntax is also accepted in this value field.

So far the only solution I can think of is to build a generic user control that accepts a webpageId as a parameter.

I am just getting ready to do that on a site because they want to be able to edit sidebar and other html content via the admin. I will try the other suggestion also and see how far I get with it.
I'm going to post a feature request because we have clients wanting to do this without doing ftp edits.