Widget is a funny name, but as with many other names online, it’s largely become a commonplace term within the blogging community, at least the blogging community that uses the world-renowned Wordpress blogging software.

What are Wordpress widgets?

“Wordpress widgets” is a term that is used to describe the easy-to-use sidebar functions in any of the widget ready Wordpress themes. From within your Wordpress blog’s administration area, through the use of client-side scripting languages; Ajax and JavaScript, users can “click and drag” certain sidebar elements and rearrange them to meet their ideal sidebar setup. These elements include the blog search box, links, pages, meta (containing admin login links, rss feed links), categories, most recent posts and text-box elements.

Today, nearly all up-to-date Wordpress themes are widget ready, meaning that instead of manually having to modify code in the sidebar.php file for your active Wordpress template to get your desired look, in order to modify the look of your Wordpress themes’ sidebar, you only need to click on the desired element to add it to the sidebar or re-arrange the elements in any widget ready theme. (more…)