Oh my god is that a widget!

I wanted to write another CSS based article or two for this weekend but ive spent a few hours looking into widgets. This is a brief article about widgets and what they can do for your site

Im a huge fan of Technorati. The wordpress dashboard has a great little feature which shows you the ‘Incoming Links’ to your site via Technorati. Ive looked at the code in the index-extra.php file in the wp-admin directory but ive struggled to figure out the best way to apply it to the sidebar. Anyways, my lack of good programming skills led me to a great little plugin which does exactly what i want. The plugin is from DannyJames.net and can be downloaded from here : Technorati Incoming Links Widget.

You can see a demo of the plugin on Danny’s Site (kudos to Danny for releasing exactly what i was looking for!:))

The one obstacle that i have come across is that this plugin is a widget. Ive been reading a lot about widgets recently but i have not yet added them to BloggingTips - i say yet as im gonna mess about with them soon (ill explain more about this later, at the moment im using widgets on my text blog).

So what is a widget?

Basically, widgets simplifies how you display your wordpress blog, more often than not your sidebar. Most explanations of a widget say that its great for those who don’t know HTML however it’s beneficial for all users in my opinion. In future versions of wordpress im sure that it will be integrated with the official release but for the moment its an addon (The official wordpress widget blog can be found here). You simply place your widgets directory in your plugin or includes directory and all widgets can be activated in your plugins section like any normal plugin.

The widget plugin can be downloaded from Automattic.

Widget Compatible Themes

If you’ve been browsing for a good wordpress template recently you will have notuced a lot of themes stating that they are ‘widget ready’. The default and classic wordpress themes are not widget ready however more and more themes being released every week.

The most well known widget theme is called K2. The Themes using WordPress Widgets page has loads of themes which are free to use and are widget ready. If your looking for a theme which is widget ready i strongly recommend checking out that page. You’ll notice that quite a lot of the themes there use a modifed version of the K2 theme i mentioned above. One great example of this is SilentBits, a great blogging tips website like this one (you’ll find loads of great articles on there from the owner Piotr).

What if your theme isnt widget ready? Well, dont worry yourself too much. There is a full guide on Widgetizing Themes on Automattic : Widgetizing Themes. It’s fairly straight forward. The main thing you need to do is update your functions.php file and then make sure your sidebar is using lists properly. If i have time i will write an article detailing step by step what you need to do to get this done.

So are Widgets perfect?

I still dont have much experience with them but the main problem i have seen is that you might notice a slowdown on your menu loading.Some large wordpress driven sites have had problems with this. Recently, TechCrunch had problems with downtime due to widgets and external services etc (see more here).

I dont think small to medium sites will have any problems though. It should also be noted that large traffic sites have a lot of problems with software which runs perfectly on smaller sized sites.

Why aren’t they on BloggingTips?

They will be soon. Im currently messing about with the widgets in the wordpress test area i have setup however the main reason they arent on here yet is our site design is that in the next week or two this site will probably have a new design…either a good free theme available or a design ive paid for. I messed around with an original theme for a while and whilst i understand html, css and php etc im no expert designer. Long story short, i dont want to spend time widgetising the current theme if its gonna be replaced soon.

Summary

More and more widgets are coming available. I reckon widgets will be included in future releases of wordpress so it looks like they’re here to stay in one way or another.

As i mentioned before, once i convert my new theme to be widget ready ill write a step by step guide showing you how you do it.

Thanks,
kevin