Adding a Widget To Your Sidebar

Widgets
If your theme allows Widgets, you will see a “Widgets” link in the menu under appearance. Widgets allow you to alter what appears in the sidebars and footers of your blog.

WordPress widgets are content elements that can be added to the sidebar of your blog or website. For example, there are widgets that include Delicious bookmarks, Flickr photos, etc. Depending on the theme, you can also further customize the look and feel of your blog/website. Some themes allow you to add a custom image header and other features.

By default, your right side bar will have items such as Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Archives and Categories. These sections will automatically populate as people begin posting and commenting on your blog. However, you may also find it useful to add other widgets to the sidebar, which you can do simply by dragging items from the “Available Widgets” box over to the “Primary Widget Area” box on the right side. You can also change the order that the widgets appear by dragging and dropping within the “Primary Widget Area” box.

Some widgets that you might find especially useful:

• Authors – This widget gives a list of all the authors who are registered on the blog. It also allows you to quickly click on an author to see all of that author’s posts. This is useful if you have a class in which each student will post many items and you’d like to get a snapshot of an individual student’s work.
• Links – Displays the items you’ve entered in the Links section.
• Tag Cloud – Shows the tags that have been attached to posts on the blog, with more frequently-used tags appearing larger.
• Text – This allows you to plug in any text or HTML code that you’d like to appear in the sidebar.