WordPress Widgets, a plug-in from Automattic.com makes it easy to chop up and manage customizations in your sidebar. This is a great way for those experiencing difficulty in editing lines of code in their sidebar.

What exactly is a Widget? Automattic’s site has perfectly defined it as:

“Widgets” is just a silly buzzword we’ve chosen for this sidebar-chopping plug-in we have developed. They could have been called Gadgets or Gizmos or Wizbangs or Whatevers. On the surface, they’re just things you can use to personalize your WordPress site without knowing HTML.

In order to use widgets, you’ll need the sidebar widget plug-in and a widget-ready theme. Once the plug-in is activated, you will get a new tab in the ‘presentation’ section of your wordpress admin console called ‘Sidebar Widgets’. In this tab, you’ll have the ability to move around widgets in your sidebar through a simple drag-and-drop interface. You simply drag-and-drop widgets between the ’sidebar’ area and the ‘available widgets’ area. The latter is where newly installed widgets will appear.

My favorite feature, by far, is the Sidebar Widget plug-in’s ability to generate generic ‘text’ widgets. Although most widgets are customizable within this interface, the ‘text’ widget is very powerful simply because it accepts HTML. Here, you can place advertisements, affiliate links, HTML code that you get from web services, etc. Placing them inside ‘text’ widgets make it easy to manage them in the long run. Need to remove that a line of code? Simply drag the ‘text’ widget containing the information back to the ‘available widgets’ area and you’re done. It’s that simple. Javascript also works when placed in a ‘text’ widget.

An added default feature is the ‘rss’ widget. Like the ‘text widget, you can have more than 1 of these in your sidebar. With the ‘rss’ widget, you can pipe external feeds into your sidebar. Granted it’s in your sidebar, but hey, it’s free and it’s easy.

These are the default features when you load up the Sidebar Widgets plug-in. There are lots of additional widgets available at the wordpress widgets site. There are widgets for a lot of things like photos, videos and music. Of course, as an online marketer, you’ll find that the ‘text’ widget is all you need. If you haven’t been using widgets, I really recommend that you take a look and consider using them for your niche blogs.

So what’s your favorite widget?

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