Selected Subpages

I just got an email from Martin about a new page hierarchy widget that does a neat job of showing the subpages of only the page you select.

All Consuming

We hear from Ali Hassan that he has written a new widget for the All Consuming media catalog service. It looks pretty sharp in his sidebar, displaying his Currently Listening and Recent Reads lists.

King Search

I never figured anyone would need to find anything important in my blog, but not everyone is this self-abasing. For the rest, there is the WordPress Widget King Search. The author has come up with his own Widget Framework that is required to make this widget work.

I haven't tried any of the King widgets. Have you? Can you attest to their royalty?

King Links

Want to really customize your link widget? King Links lets you have multiple link widgets, each with something like 20 options.

Chitika eMiniMalls

Chitika, a very popular service that helps you make money from your blog, has completed their eMiniMalls Sidebar Widget plugin for WordPress. The eMiniMall is a slick, interactive shopping kiosk embedded into your website.

I don't usually try every widget that comes across my desk but I had to take this one for a test drive. It's quite a treat for me, especially after writing all of the simple widgets that come with the plugin, to see a widget so rich with features. It's a multi-widget so you can have up to nine of them. The pop-up control panel lets you choose from several sizes and set up your own colors so that your widget fits beautifully with any theme. It has an Advanced mode for setting up keyword-based ad filtering and an AJAX form for testing your keywords without leaving the widget control panel. This is good stuff.

To use it, you first have to sign up for a Chitika affiliate account. (That's our signup referral link. Thanks for clicking!) After you receive your associate ID, download and activate the Chitika widget plugin to enable the widget. Enter your ID in the widget's control panel and you're on your way.

King Text

Yes, another Text Widget. This one accepts PHP code and can be assigned to specific categories so it doesn’t have to always show up on the page.

This is not the first widget I’ve seen that lets you define the before/after HTML that are generally defined by the theme. Is this something people are finding useful?

Theme Widgets

Stuart Ugelow figures most theme designers aren't up to the task of coding new widgets. I think that's fair enough to say. So he came up with a Theme Widgets plugin that is meant to make it easy for theme designers to create widgets.

Here's how it works: the theme designer adds any number of "widget-*.php" files to the theme directory. Each widget has its name in a comment (like page templates) and the rest of the file is output. You can fill it with HTML or template tags or PHP. Your widgets will then appear as options in the Theme Widgets for your users.

This will save the theme designer a few steps. This simplicity comes at a cost however: more files in the theme directory, more files for WordPress to look for and load every time someone views the blog. The milliseconds add up quickly when the traffic comes calling, so always do your best to optimize your themes for speed.

ExecPHP

Otto's second widgetized plugin gives you an additional set of widgets just like Text widgets except that the contents will be evaluated as PHP. Now there is really nothing you can't do with a few of these. Be careful!

Google AdSense

Many people have figured out that it's possible to put AdSense code in the built-in Text widgets. Otto went the extra mile and made a new plugin that adds up to four additional widgets just like Text widgets except they're called AdSense widgets.

Linkblock

Matthew Holger sent in his Linkblock widget. This is how he described it:

Don't know if anything like this has crossed your way yet or not, but I created a "Linkblock" widget that can be instantiated up to nine times (it's derived from the "Text" widget included with the widget source), has a configurable title, and displays only links from a specified category using the parameters defined for that link category in the WP Admin interface.

Makes managing items in the widget bar a bit more configurable, and made it much easier for me to hide categories I don't want displayed, without having to make code changes. Yay!