In my last post I discussed WordPress plugins that can spruce up your WordPress based website. What I would like to do in this one is point out five sidebar widgets that you can put to use in your own sidebar to expand its capabilities and add additional functionality to your site for your visitors.

-  Sidebar Login: This plugin is not only a widget that you can drag onto your sidebar in the admin interface but also provides a template tag that you can use anywhere in your site to show a login box.  Once your visitor logs in via this form they will be returned to the page they signed in from instead of into the admin panel (unless they are an admin then they log into the admin interface).

Not logged in

Logged in as Admin

-  Registration Widget: What better widget to have right next to the Sidebar Login widget above then the one that lets a visitor register a user account so they can use that nifty Sidebar Login form as well.  Very straight forward install and then add the widget to your sidebar where you want it.

-  Moon Phases: Now this plugin would obviously be perfect on an astronomy or space blog/website.  Its premise is simple after installing the plugin go to your appearance admin panel and add the Moon Phases widget to your sidebar and save it.  There are four settings you can change which include Title; Show Zodiac; Show age (not yours – the moons); and Show details.  I am a space and astronomy buff so stuff like this grabs my attention easily

-  Global Translator: Just what it sounds like with up to 41 language options at your disposal depending on what translation engine you select.  Adds a widget to your appearance admin panel that you can add to your sidebar. Just click on the flag of the country you want to translate the page into.

 

-  TwiBadge: I guess this list would not be complete without a little Twitter love.  Here is a sidebar widget plugin that lets you add your Twitter Badge to your own sidebar.  It is very configurable and does not require your Twitter password to work. 

 

So what is your nifty sidebar widget that you can not live without on your site? Looking forward to hearing what your using.

This plugin modifies wp_title() (the function used to create the title of your website to output all parent Pages when viewing a Page.

Allow Numeric Stubs

Starting with WordPress 2.5, there is a bug where you cannot have a child Page that’s stub is a number. For example this will not work: /about/5/. That URL conflicts with paged content feature where you can posts and Pages with multiple pages of content by adding <!--nextpage--> within your content.

This plugin allows you to have children Pages with numbers as stubs by giving up the ability to have paged Pages which isn’t a big deal as most people don’t use paged Pages anyway.

p2pConverter

Converts either a static Page into a Post, or a Post into a static Page! Just click on the Manage tab in the Admin interface, and click the Posts or Pages sub-tab.

Status Press Widget

Adds a Facebook Status Widget to display your Facebook status in your sidebar. Based on Status Press plugin (not required!) by Adam Walker Cleaveland & C. Scott Andreas.

Customizable Search Widget

Adds a Customizable Search Widget to give you more control over how the search box looks on your sidebar.

List Drafts Widget

List Drafts is a simple sidebar widget which outputs a list of the titles of all posts currently saved as drafts. Users can set the title of the widget, and add a label to be used for all untitled drafts.

Post and Page Excerpt Widgets

Creates widgets that display excerpts from posts or pages in the sidebar. You may use ‘more’ links and/or link the widget title to the post or page.

And, while on the topic of plugins, take a look at Clever Carrot’s 10 WordPress Plugins to Grow Great Sites.

WP Admin Bar Reloaded is displays links to the Administration Panel at the top of a blog’s page – but only for users who are logged in and have permission to view the given functions.

©Feed add coyright message, GUID for content-theft and ID of the Feed-Reader to your feed. (Page in German)

Tab-U-Later eliminates tabs from the WordPress admin interface.

jLanguage allows you to easily write multilingual posts and flag-icons are automaticly used when using the 40+ predefined languages.

Widget Releases

MyBlogLog Widget displays your MBL visitors and avatars in your sidebar.

MyBlogLog Community Widget displays the communities you belong to in your sidebar.

WP OpenAds is a WordPress Plugin that allows website owners to easily integrate advertising into their posts and pages.

Buddy Cards are small windows that are shown next to comments and contain a subset of either public Buddy Page information available through 30 Boxes, or dynamically created information as a result of an open web search.

WP Categories and Posts is an extension of the wp_list_categories. Instead of listing just categories, the plugin lists the post under the each category as well. This is very useful for a sitemap.

Featuring CountComments counts the number of comments by authornames.

WP Amazon context link ads is a quick and convenient way to add Amazon Context Links to blog and help you monetize your content.

Breukie’s Pages Widget is a WordPress pages widget, to replace the standard pages widget by Automattic.

Complex Email Forms allows WordPress users to easily create complex forms to be emailed to a predefined email address.

Last Posts to Picture create a picture from your last posts.

SimpleTwitter allows WordPress blog owners to add Twitter messages to their templates.

CompleteRSS makes your feeds validate and attracts more users by displaying full article text in your RSS and Atom feeds, removing the ‘content:encoded’ tags from the XML, and makes your feeds appeal to more users.

Flog Maker is an entirely self-contained alternative flash blog system that resides within a WordPress plugin, designed for absolutely seamless integration with your WordPress installation.

Flashbox is is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page using a combination of Javascript and Flash 8.

altrugon dropdown categories gives you a function called altrugon_dropdown_categories() which displays your categories in a drop down list and at the same time use the onchange() event to submit the chosen category. (Site in Spanish)

Weather.com widget – shows forecast information for a city. Displays image related to current conditions.

Imieniny WordPress Widget Plugin provides the various saints names commemorated on a particular day. In parts of Europe, particularly Poland, saints ‘namedays’ or Imieniny are celebrated like birthdays.

Quick SMS is a WordPress Widget and Plugin which allows visitors to your blog to send SMS direct to your mobile.

Throttle is a WordPress implementation of a bandwidth and script limiting throttle. It provides an API to monitor and report current load to plugins or themes, allowing them to limit non-essential elements until load reduces.

Meyshans SpicyPipes once installed and configured displays question and answer from yahoo answers and related photos from Flickr.

Tags24 adds common Technorati-tags into your posting by setting a special html-similar tag.

Ma.gnolia WordPress Plugin makes it easy to output a list of your Ma.gnolia bookmarks anywhere on your site. You can set it to only pull bookmarks with a specific tag, which is great for listing sites related to a specific category or post.

Unitary is a Units Converter sidebar widget for WordPress that can convert between hundreds of different units of Length, Area, Volume, Weight / Mass, Speed etc.

Security Code creates a security image with security code that is shown on the register screen.

tdw-combobox-links displays the links in the sidebar as dropdown boxes. It will list each of your link categories in a separate box.

PG-CafePress is a WordPress 2.0 plugin that uses the PrestoGifto API and lets you put CafePress stuff into your sidebar, a static page, your footer or after posts.

SpamViewer deletes spam entries in your database as marked by WordPress or various spam plugins like SK2, Akismet, trackback validator etc.

TDO Mini Forms allows you to add a form to your website that allows non-registered users and/or subscribers (configurable) to submit posts.

Selig-Stats provides you with a number of filters that can be used directly within your posts / pages in order to display some statistics like post count, comment count etc.

Technorati Rank utilizes the Technorati API to display your blog information (Rank, Links, Blogs Linking) and an Add to Favorites all in simple display.

CodeHighlighter uses GeSHi to highlight syntax for source code.

Book Cover displays the book cover image from ISBN.

WordPress AdSense Deluxe+ Widget is a widgetized version of AdSense Deluxe+ Plugin

Attach Links is a Word Press plugin that allows you to attach one or more external links to each post. They will be shown in a list when calling the function al_display().

TellAFriendPost allows the user to forward the post to there friend.

PromotePost allows the user to Extend the post reach by forwarding it to the 45 sites including del.icio.us, Digg, Flurl, Techorati.

DoubleClick Meaning allows you to doubleclick on a word to know its definition / meaning.

ScaleImage scales images in the post using a slider.

Duplicate Content Cure prevents duplicate content in wordpress blogs by adding a noindex meta tag to wordpress pages that don’t contain any unique value, like categories, archives, and paged pages.

wp-publications-archive is a WordPress plugin that allows administrators to upload and manage all sorts of files (i.e., publications). Additionally, end-users are able to navigate, search, and download them in the front-office.

Currency Converter sidebar widget for WordPress that can convert between 148 currency formats from all over the world.

Ajaxified Expand Post NOW uses AJAX to expand the “more…” on your blog.

Visualize Advanced Features will display the hidden buttons in the WordPress 2.1 WYSIWYG editor.

Meyshan 6 acts as a place holder for any 6 plugins of your choice, in a very beautiful mini tabbed pages.

onAirNow gets information about your currently playing track from a file uploaded via FTP and displays it on your blog.

IWG Extended Author List expands your author-list at the post-page of every user that is allowed to show_in_authorlist.

hideAd allows the owner of the blog to embed advertisements but give periodical visitors the possibility to hide these ads.

Thickbox Automator is an edited version of the original ImageWiz. After telling it where your images are located, what size thumbnails you want and a few other minor details, it produces the code which you can paste into any post or page.

LiveContact is an AJAX powered Contact Form plugin for WordPress.

Comment Spam Trap is a simple, yet effective plugin that kills comment spam, including the hated trackback spam.

Search Everything enables the searching of Pages, Comments and more.

Hover is a WordPress plugin replacing keywords with links and an optional popup.

BibTex is a tool for formatting lists of references used by the LaTeX document preparation system.

My Link Order Widgetized is the widgetized version of My Link Order.

Role Manager 2.0 is based on the plugin by Owen Winkler. This Plugin allows you to define and manage multiple subscriber profiles – called Roles and their Capabilities. Also you can create new Roles and Capabilities.

WatchMyBack24 verifies if a backlink exists to your trackbacked posting. If no backlink is given, the trackback will fail.

Tickme.com plugin adds a TickMe.com ribbon to the top right of your WordPress Blog, with a link to your profile on TickMe.

TechTags is a simple Technorati tags plugin for WordPress. Add a single line to a post or page to display Technorati tags.

Multi Column Link List generates an alphabetical listing of your WordPress links in multiple columns. You can choose the number of columns to display, with an option to split up the list of links by letter.

“Deep Thoughts” Random Quote Widget is the widgetized version of Random Quote.

Cimy Page Navigator generates page lists which can be styled with CSS to create navigation menus.

Persistent Styles allows you to have styles that are supra-theme so you won’t lose them on upgrade/replacement of your theme.

WikiMap adds a map with a location to your post, add a map-page to your blog or turn your blog into a fullscreen map-community.