One of the great things that come with my new PRO themes are custom widgets. Many people love to use widgets because they add extra functionality without touching a line of code. Although WordPress comes with a lot of nice widgets sometimes you need extra widgets that are custom made to support an indivuduals themes functionality. BranfordMagazine, WyntonMagazine and all themes that may come in the future have such custom widgets available.
Using Widgets
Using widgets is pretty easy and most WordPress users will know it. If you are brandnew to wordpress I reccomend to read a short introduction to widgets at the WordPress codex – the official documentation for WordPress.
Custom Widgets
As already mentioned above the custom widgets of e.g. BranfordMagazine add some extra functionality such as the Newsletter Widget and/or support specific functionalities such as the “More from this Category” Widget. Here is a more in depth description of the custom widgets.
PRiNZ Newsletter
The newsletter widget uses the email functionality of feedburner and lets your users subsribe very easy by providing a simple signup form. In the backend you can add a headline such as “Newsletter”, you need to enter your Feedburner ID and you can set a text that appears in the signup box.
PRiNZ About
This widget provides a sidebar box that displays information about the author or admin of the site. You can define if it should display an image (requires Gravatars), you can enter a little description, set a link to a page (e.g About us page) and define the name if the link.
PRiNZ More from this Category
There is nothing to set for this widget but nevertheless it adds great functionality to your site because it displays the 5 most recent posts from the same category of the post users are currently reading. This works only on single post pages of course.
PRiNZ Author Posts
Again there is nothing to set for this widget. similar to the “More from this Category” widget it displays the 5 most recent posts from the author of the article that a user is currently reading. This one also works on single post pages only.
PRiNZ Twitter
Twitter becomes more and more famous and also an important communication tool. The twitter widget lets you display your last x tweets in the sidebar. You can set the title need to enter your twittername, a number of tweets to show and you can add a link to your twitterpage if you like to.
PRiNZ Recent Posts
Why another recent posts widget you might ask. WordPress provides one by default. That´s true but it doesn´t deliver the style that fits for my themes. So the recent post widget does nothing else than the regular recent post widget but it adds the correct style that matches the themes style.
PRiNZ Comments
Just like the recent posts widget the comments widget lets you display a list of recent comments but again in the themes specific style.
PRiNZ Contact Info
The contact info widget provides a nice way to display some contact information in the sidebar. You can enter a title, your name, adress telephone and spam protected email adress.
Finally…
…it´s up to you which widgets you use and how you arrange them in the sidebar or somewhere else. As you know my themes have several widgetized areas and you can use the custom widgets in each of them of course.
Which additional widgets would you like me to add in furture updates and themes? Post a comment!