Woah, these are fun!
Looking for the hack to get a login box on the sidebar, I’ve come across WordPress Widgets, old news and well known, but no one told me! If you’ve viewed Little Storping in the past hour, you’ll have seen the sidebar jumping all over the place.
After I downloaded the login widget plugin I became discouraged. It didn’t work. This is where reading the instructions help: you need the widgets plugin. And a compatible theme (included, but I didn’t twig that). Anyway, finally I got it working. Most people will read the readme and be up and running in minutes.
After all that, at first I was dubious. Great concept: drag and drop widgets onto the sidebar for your links, pages, categories etc. But it wasn’t how I wanted it: the login box looked wrong, the categories didn’t indent. Then I realised there were all these options, with explanations if you hover over… So ironically although at first I thought it would be easier just to go straight in and hack the php, with just a little bit of learning, I’ve now got a framework for doing whatever I want with my sidebar. And I’ve got a great login widget.
Right I’m off to find some more cool widgets. Please ignore the sidebar if it dances around for a bit. And let me have any requests… Google search box? Display RSS feeds, recent comments etc?
