Teddy reads theWordPress Widget Manual
The WordPress standard widgets
WordPress offers a number of standard widgets. The below screen shows them all below. As stated there could be additional widgets from the theme developer or the user can add additional widgets with one of the numerous plug-ins available to WordPress. These will be briefly described at the end of the article.
WordPress standard widgets
Description of the standard widgets
Archives: Displays a list of every month you posted an article in a year date order. Click on a particular month and it will then display all the posts in that month.
Calendar: Displays a calendar. On most themes the dates where an article has been posted is displayed in bold.
Categories: Displays a list of categories. Click on a category and the posts in that category are displayed – usually in reverse chronological order.
Custom Menu: Allows the user to display a custom menu in a widget area.
Links: Displays a list of clickable, usually external links, known as a blogroll.
Meta: Links to the blog’s admin page and other areas of the blog. Unless you have a very good reason to keep it – remove this widget immediately – if not you are tempting silly people to try and break into your site.
Pages: Displays the blog’s Pages.
Recent Comments: Displays a quick summary of the most recent comments on the blog.
Recent Posts: Very useful. Displays a list of titles and clickable links of the most recent postings. The user can state how many posts are displayed.
RSS: This is what is known in the business as a feed. Your blog posts are put into a format easily read by computers. People subscribe to these feeds using specialist readers and feeds are used by services, such as Technorati, the leading blog directory, to index and rate blogs. This is a topic that will be covered fairly soon in one of my tutorials.
Search: Places a useful, easy to use search form in the widget area.
Tag Cloud: Places a box on the sidebar and displays a list of clickable tags used on the blog. The more times a particular tag is used the larger it appears. Click a tag in the tag cloud and a list of posts that have that tag are displayed in reverse chronological order.
Text: Very useful. Will allow the user to enter a heading and text. The user can also use HTML and CSS, (the framework behind the display of the Internet and the user can display images, change the size, colour and background of text, make clickable buttons and much, much more.
My links
Blog Basics: How to install a WordPress widget
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