Widgets Everywhere - WordPress has ‘em too

Posted on April 23, 2006 No Comments

Based on some feedback, it seems like maybe I should move the more family oriented (aka personal) posts to another blog. I started working on that yesterday. My first big challenge was deciding on a theme and, as I tried different themes, keeping the information in the sidebar consistent. Then it dawned on me…

WordPress supports widgets now! This is oldish news, but I’d not really paid much attention at the time it was announced. So why does this matter? Well, if a theme is “widget-enabled” then it is simple/easy to manage all the side bar content from the blog’s admin control panel. No need to edit good ol’ sidebar.php from theme to theme to keep them all in sync and looking similar. Instead, just set it once and relax.

Well, relax once the theme’s are actually widget enabled… As this is new, there’s movement towards that end, but some designers probably have no intent to visiting old themes just to add this capability. Which is fine really. Turns out it is pretty easy to do it on your own.

And that’s what I worked on yesterday.� Found a few themes I liked, so I widget enabled them and then did the usual tweaking of the style sheets to get the look and feel I am after.� With luck, the other blog will be announced soon.

Tags: blog, widgets, WordPress