So many themes are coming out almost every week, but not all of them are widgets-ready. though wordpress’s theme gallery lets you search for themes that can handle widgets, if you don’t know exactly how the layout will be it can be downright mind-numbing going through the pages. If you’re the type of person who has to have all the choices available, Garry Conn collected the 109 widget-ready layouts as of September and zipped it up into one handy theme pack. Some of these have been featured in this blog already, though newer themes have yet to be added. Once you have this theme pack installed, you can just go to the Presentation Tab, and preview your blog with the theme with a click of the button.
Downloading and Installing
The zip is available at Blog the Internet.
- Upload the zip using ftp to your themes directory in your server. For those who don’t know how, there are detailed instructions on the same page.
- Use a program to unzip the theme pack in the themes directory. Gary suggests using Putty, and reminds that if you have themes in that directory already, don’t overwrite it! If you’ve made changes to the theme you’ll lose all of it once you overwrite.
- Once it’s done, go to your Presentation Tab and check the new themes out. Nifty!
Be warned that the size of the zip is 15 Mb, so if you’re dial-up be prepared to spend a while getting it. This is perfect for those people who can’t help but want a lot of variety in their blog themes. Now it’s time for me get that zip for my personal blog!
So maybe you want the people you know to see if you’re online for a chat while they’re looking at your blog. After all, isn’t it easier to share ideas in a messenger window rather than making a long comment thread on those posts? Now you can using the online status widget IM Online. The IM Online status widget is powered by onlinestatus.org, and supports AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, ICQ and Skype. You can pick and choose which services you want to be shown.
The download is available at:
mutube – the IM Online download link
Alternate download link
To use, you have to unzip the downloaded package and drop the IM-online folder to your WordPress plugins folder. Then it’s simply a matter of activating the plugin, dragging the widget to your sidebar, and configuring the settings. Of course, it’s important to remember that your IM service must be set to allow strangers to view your status, because otherwise it defeats the purpose! And in case you have more than one account on a network, you can add both usernames in the admin panel. The only known issue with it involves the servers that might find it hard to locate you. Fortunately, the latest release now allows you to choose a secondary server in case the first doesn’is down.
Maybe you don’t like the default icon pack? You can always download some of the additional icon packs to match the look of your blog. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous you can even make your own! Just save them with as gifs with the appropriate name and load them into the plugins/im-online folder.
Maybe you have too many things going on that sidebar. Who could resist all of those handy comments, text, and image widgets anyway? One thing that might suffer from the overload of widgets would be your archives. If you’ve been blogging for a long time your archives list might be cluttering up your blog’s sidebar. You can try to solve the problem by taking the list off the side and putting it all a separate page. But if you don’t want to remove the archives, there’s nothing to worry about. Reid Beels has come up with an archive drop down menu widget for those who want easy access to old posts but don’t have the space to put it.
The items in the menu are sorted by date and categories by default, but it can also be sorted by tag categories if you have the Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin installed. The Ultimate Tag Warrior lets you tag posts from the write post page, an Ajax-supported tag box, or by a special syntax on external editors. Be warned that if you choose to have all three options enabled on the drop-down menu it can get very long.
How to install
After downloading the archive, unzip and place dropdown-archive.php file the in the wp-content/plugins folder.
Download link to the zip file.
Reid Beels also made a Search Field Widget specific the the Safari browser to offer an alternative to the default WordPress search widget. He also made a plugin that lists all attachments in an Worspress 2.x post after the text. You can find both on the technology category of his site.
