techniQal support

As part of playing with the widget system in the newer versions of wordpress, I decided to take some of my sidebar content and widgetize it.
My first try is a widget that allows you to add the Lijit Search Wijit to your sidebar.

1. Simply download the file below and unzip the plugin
2. Upload the myLijit.php file to your /wp-content/plugins directory
3. Login to your wordpress admin console and activate the plugin
4. Go to Presentation management, click on the Widgets tab, and you can drag it to any location on your sidebar
5. Edit the widget by clicking , select the title for the widget block, and specify your Lijit username.
6. Enjoy

Download the code

If you want to learn how to build your own wordpress widget, I followed the code and the tutorial at Blue-Anvil .

UPDATE:
Something I should have mentioned about this plugin. This is built to work with WordPress 2.2.* automatically . The latest version of WP contains a built-in sidebar widget plugin.
For earlier 2.* versions, you need to install the WordPress Widgets plugin before your sidebar will be “widget” enabled.

A full tutorial and links to download the plugin, are available at http://automattic.com/code/widgets/use/ .
It should be fairly easy to install , if you have access to your wordpress installation, and use either the Classic, or Kubrick themes.

Some things to remember when following the tutorial:

1. Backup your default theme files before copying the new theme files to your wp-content/themes folder.
2. Activate the WordPress Widgets plugin

If you really want a widget enabled sidebar, you can also go the route of upgrading to 2.2.

I am trying out some new themes, and have upgraded wordpress to the latest version. This is causing me some headaches with page load time, and some other gotchas with plugins and such. So if the site seems weird, that is normal. I hope to have everything in better shape soon.

I really like the latest theme I am playing with. By N.Design Studio, it features good looking MacOS styling, and even features a widgetized sidebar, with drag and drop re-sorting, and collapsing. Hopefully it will continue to work for me.

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