Totally Wicked With Widgets!
Feeling bored with your old theme? Want more customization in your blog? You can do that now with the WordPress Widgets! WordPress developer, Andy Skelton has announced the next generation of funky new WordPress plugin, WordPress Widgets, which drove the blogging community to both ends of the enthusiasm spectrum. Whether you love it or hate it, it’s here to stay.
To the people around the world, gadgets or gizmos are typically used to refer to helpful little high technology devices or tools. But to the tech savvy people of the computer or technology world, a widget is used generically for a plugin that can be placed in your blog’s sidebar. The best thing about widget is that even if you do not have any knowledge of html or how to edit a web page, you can still easily drag and drop for convenient customization or to increase your blog’s functionality. Through the use of widget, a self-contained piece of code that allows you to move into, out of or anywhere inside the sidebar area of your blog without touching a line of code, you can easily personalize your blog and deliver information just the way you wanted it with just a few clicks of your mouse.
Apart from the standard widgets in WordPress, there is also a vast variety of external widgets to choose from. Webpage such as http://www.widgetbox.com provides thousands of widgets for your blog, profile, or webpage with numerous categories ranging from humor, news, movies, music, sports and a lot more. Besides having widgets, it also contains several guides on how to make your own widget to give your blog a ‘truly yours’ experience or if you’re a developer, writing a WordPress Widget is as easy as a plugin and they’ve even documented all the APIs (application programming interface) for you, as well as including guides for theme authors and current plugin authors. In addition to the 130,000+ blogs on WordPress.com, the talented developers also have the ability to keep tab on to the thousands of people who are still downloading the WordPress program every day and the many hundreds thousands of the already existing WordPress blogs out in the World Wide Web.
By using Javascripts and Ajax, widgets are very much similar to boxes representing content elements within your theme’s sidebar. The only disadvantage is that you can’t change how they look or work. The standard elements include;
Archives – displays archive links for each month that has posts.
Blog stats – displays statcounter and traffic count to your blog.
Calendar – displays a calendar of the current month with dates appearing as links if there are posts for that day.
Categories – displays a list of post categories as links to those posts.
Links – displays list of links (blogroll) separated by category.
Pages – displays a link to each Page.
Most Recent Posts/Comments – displays list of the blog’s most recent posts or approved comments.
Meta/admin – displays links to meta functions such as Site Admin, Login/Out, Entries RSS, Comments RSS, and WordPress.org.
Search – displays a Search box to enter text to search your blog. A submit button is also provided.
Text – used to enter HTML, Javascript, or just plain text. Using this opens a number of possible uses for text widgets.
Also a very cool thing you can do is to add RSS feeds from other websites with these new widgets in your sidebar. And as such, widgets can be used for an infinite variety of purposes limited only by your imagination. The only downfall is that too many widgets can slow down your blog. Hence, try to control yourself from over-widgetizing your blog and avoid badly designed widgets. After all, too much of anything is too much.
