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I wanted to add a section to the sidebar today for the blog to list all the affiliate networks I use to make money. Because the new blog design is widget ready, I wanted to make it as a widget ready plugin as opposed to just a normal bullet list. Of course there was no great reason to do this with such a simple list, but I was curious to see how it’s done and I wanted to control my whole side panel from the widget menu in Wordpress.

As it turns out, making a basic widget ready plugin is not that difficult as long as you have a basic understanding of php. All you do is write it as a standalone php document, upload it to your plugins directory, enable it in your control panel and then add the widget to the side bar.

In terms of writing the php inside the plugin file I won’t explain the whole process here, there is a much better explanation that I used at a site called Lonewolf Online I followed this example to create mine and if you look down the side bar you can see that it worked perfectly.

The only thing I really needed to change from this example was to change the class of the title “H2″ tag to the correct class from my CSS file.

Now that I’ve done it and seen what’s involved I may have a go at writing something more sophisticated. If that is I can think of something that hasn’t already been done and done better, wish me luck.