alanguilan dot com weblog

i’ve been spending some free time widgetizing this blog. the wordpress widget is a new plug-in that is suppose to make it easy to configure and manage the sidebar. for the most part it does make things easier and simpler. rearranging the sidebar becomes a click, drag and drop affair.

but before i could get to that state of sidebar simplicity i had to edit two files from my theme — sidebar.php and functions.php to make it widget-friendly. the theme i’m using is based on the default kubrick theme and luckily it was one of those themes that can be easily changed to accomodate the widgets. automattic did include replacement files for those two files but i made a handful of changes to my sidebar.php already and replacing it wasn’t an option that i was considering. the instructions to editing the files and installing the plug-in are super simple and easy to follow.

first time i used the widgets the resulting sidebar had the default layout that i had when i first used the theme. this meant that my handful of changes to the search and meta sections wasn’t being used by the widget. which also means that the widget sort of replaces the sidebar code with its own.

aaawwww.

well, no biggie. there’s a how-to on using my original search box code as a widget so i just followed that and i got my search box. the next problem is the meta section. the edits i made in my meta was just to comment out the links to the entries and comments rss feed and the wordpress link. there wasn’t any documentation on changing the meta section so i did a little hacking using the how-to mentioned above as a guide and i got my widgetized meta section.

i got some more free time during the holy week so i’d probably check out what other stuff this widget thingy is capable of.

entry posted on Monday, 10 April 2006 and filed under site, software, stuff, theme, wordpress. you can follow any responses through the rss 2.0 feed. comments are closed, but you can trackback from your own site.