Working with WordPress Widgets
In the past, modifying your blog sidebar required mucking around with your theme code, and even knowing a bit of PHP. Fortunately, WordPress widgets eliminate the hassle by allowing bloggers to easily configure a custom sidebar with drag-and-drop ease.
The WordPress community has developed a large and growing collection of widgets that will allow you to plug all sorts of things into your WordPress sidebar. From Flickr photos to your Twitter status, if there’s something you’d like to add to your blog sidebar, chances are there’s a widget to help you do it.
This video is an introduction to installing and using WordPress Widgets.
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Comments
[...] Here is a WordPress video demonstrating how widgets are plugged into a WordPress blog: http://wordpresstraining.com/videos/customize/working-with-wordpress-widgets/ [...]
Hi Kirk
Thanks for this wonderful video you have made on Widget. I am very new to WordPress but have very good knowledge on blogger. I was looking in google crazy for tutorials for learning how to arrange widgets like that of blogger and had no luck.
Your video help me to understand how to do that.
Thanks a million. Fan of your blog.
Alam
twitter.com/alamj2000
@Christian If your theme has a widgetized sidbar you can simply drop the Text Widget onto the sidebar, then manually enter the IMG tag with the image that you want to display. You can even upload the image through the media manager and use the URL generated by the media manager as your SRC attribute.
Alternately, I’m sure there are a number of plugins that solve this same problem in any number of different ways (pulling images from Flickr or other services, etc.).
Kirk,
These are wonderful videos! I’ve spent the last couple weeks learning the new 2.5 interface, and dealing with issues like image uploading and missing IDs. Your videos are really helpful. The widget video is timely for me. I’m trying to figure out how to modify the functions.php file to create a text widget using definition lists, and not having much luck.
Do you have plans for a future video on customizing the functions.php file?