Since the time Wordpress has introduced wigetized sidebars customizing WordPress powered blogs became much easier task. With huge amount of plugins and widgets available for free download webmasters can pick and choose what kind of info display on their’s blogs, where to place it on the pages and all that can be done without ever changing the source code or template files. All updates can be done directly from the blog admin panel after you’ve done small modification to your theme.

In the default (Kubrick) theme there is only one widgetized sidebar created and you can see it if you go to “widgets” option in the “Design” section of your WordPress admin panel. You can place unlimited amount of widgets there but the problem is - you have very little flexibility how these blocks will look on the front end. Appearance of all elements are controlled by the same styling options assigned to the ID=”sidebar”.

Here is a simple tutorial how you can create new widgetized zones (I call them “zones” since they do not have to be placed in the sidebar), place them anywhere on the page and have full control over the style of each widgetized zone. (more…)

Sometimes I get an inspiration to improve my blog with new element or plugin and that’s where problem starts. Sure I can hard code new snippet directly into template file or spend couple of hours trying to find suitable solution on Wordpress website.

There is a very good chance that feature I want to include on my blog has been already implemented by someone but I have no idea how he named this plugin or which section he posted it in.

Last time I got lucky thanks to the Pixel Shoppe with his recommendations on plugins that I can use with WordPress blog.

They were describing AdSense Manager plugin which supports multiple ad networks and that’s exactly what I was looking for. In addition this plugin gives you full control over ad placements without need to modify styles or source files.

I found more good recommendations on other WordPress plugins, tweaks and template modifications. General tips for bloggers section they have is also interesting read… (more…)