A friend emailed me today to ask how to add a search box to a new blog theme he's installing. I think he thought it was going to be horribly complicated, but it isn't: WordPress gives you the ability to add search, and plenty of other useful things, to your blog in just a couple of clicks. Widgets are little tricks which WP has stored, and which you can choose to add (or remove) at any time, without needing to edit any files or do anything complicated at all. Widgets are a very easy way to add useful functions - like a search box, links to your newest posts or comments, or even a tag cloud - to your blog. But like many of WP's useful features, they're hidden away in the dashboard and you have to know they're there in order to be able to use them.

From your WP Dashboard, click on Design, and then Widgets. You should see a list of available widgets, each with links to "add" to your sidebars. Click on "add" for the one you want, and you'll see it appear in the list on the list. You can re-order the widgets just by sliding the blocks around. You'll need to click the "save" button at the bottom to make your edits appear on your blog.

Some widgets have further options which you can access by clicking "edit". For example, you can control whether Category and Archive lists are shown as a list of links or a drop-down form-style list, and whether the number of posts in each is displayed or not. If you add a list of WP Pages, you can control what order they show in, and specify any pages you want excluded from the list. If you choose to have Recent Posts or Recent Comments, you can decide how many posts or comments you want to link to.

It's worth having a play to see what looks good, because you can remove widgets at the click of a button too.

Tags: sidebar, widgets

Posted by Sue on November 20, 2008 in WordPress.