Build a Blog

So What’s a Widget Then…

Widgets are the best and easiest way to add features and functionality to your blog without having to know any code or PHP to do it. Here’s a list of the widgets that are available for the test blog – Build a Blog with Wordpress:

Akismet – helps block spam from your blog and provides stats on it
Archives - monthly archives of your blog posts
Authors – if your blog has more than one author
Blog stats – show your stats
Blog subscriptions – add an email sign up form to subscribe to your blog
Box.net – file sharing
Calendar - calendar of your blog posts
Category – your blogs categories, list or drop down menu
Category Cloud - category cloud
del.icio.us – add your favourite bookmarks
Gravatar – add a Gravatar image
Image - add an image to your sidebar
Links - add your Blogroll (list of your favourite links) to the sidebar
Meebo – Meebo
Meta - admin login access
Pages – your blogs pages
Recent Posts – add your blogs most recent posts
RSS - add entries from any RSS Feed
RSS Links - links to your blogs RSS Feed
Search - a search form for your blog
SocialVibe - Get sponsored, support a charity
Text - add any text or HTML to the sidebar
Top Clicks - your blogs Top Clicks
Top Posts - your blogs Top Posts
Top Rated – a list of your blogs top rated posts, pages or comments
Twitter - display your tweets from Twitter
VodPod videos - add Vodpod videos

How Do I Add One to my Blog?

Go to Appearance –> Widgets and take a look around, it should look similar to the image below. Which is the widget page for the test blog Build a Blog with Wordpress. As you can see on the left is the list of available widgets and on the right is the places on the blog which are able to have widgets added to them. For this blogs theme they include sidebar, footer left, footer middle, footer right and header. Then it’s a simple case of drag and drop the widgets that you want to use to the corresponding menu on the right. They will then appear in the drop down menu and you will be able to arrange them in any order you like.

Below are some screen shots to show you where the widgets will appear on the test blog when I add them to the corresponding areas on the widget page in the blogs admin:

The red area at the top next to the blog title is the header area for widgets and the red area on the right is the sidebar area for widgets.

This screen shot is of the footer of the blog and is at the very bottom of the site, the red area is the footer area for widgets and it offers 3 widgetised areas, left, middle and right.

These positions will differ though depending on the theme that you are using and how it has been coded. That can be a big factor when choosing a theme and an even bigger one is to make sure the theme is widget ready in the first place or you won’t be able to add anything.

Adding Widgets

Now lets add some widgets to Build a Blog with Wordpress and see what it looks like:

As you can see from this screen shot I’ve added just a few widgets to the sidebar and footer areas of the theme: an email blog subscription form, recent blog entries, my links, my Twitter feed, my Flickr feed, archives, categories and a tag cloud. They can also be easily removed from the menus by either drag and dropping again, or when setting the options for each widget it gives you the choice to delete the widget from the menu. Take a look at the test blog to see what they look like, and you’ll see how easy it is to add some great features and functionality to your blog.

Mandy

If you enjoyed this post you may want to subscribe to my RSS Feed and never miss another one!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.