8 excellent resources to enhance your WordPress sidebar

by Jean-Baptiste Jung. 43 Comments -

Sidebar is a very important part of your blog. Though, it can quickly look the same than in many other blogs. I’ve compilated 8 excellent resources to help you buid a better sidebar for your Wordpress blog.

WordPress Sidebar Turned Apple-Flashy Using jQuery UI


Apple have always been Gods in terms of the way they present themselves and their products. I just love the sidebar on the Apple Startpage, and if you love it too, you might check out this excellent tutorial, brought to you by Nettuts.

Adding Tabs to Your Blog Sidebar


One of the most recurent problems in sidebar is probably its height: You put some ads, your (long) blogroll, your last post, comments…and so on. Then you end up with a very long sidebar, which can be unesthetic and not very user-friendly. Happilly, tabs are here to help. This cool tutorial explains all you need to know to start creating your WordPress tabbed sidebar.

Building a Better Blogroll: Dynamic Fun with SimplePie and jQuery


A traditional blogroll is a simple list of other sites, often in the sidebar, that are related, owned by, or otherwise friendly to the home site. Blogrolls are a great idea and on-point with the spirit of blogging, but how is a casual reader to know if any of these sites are truly of interest? This tutorial show how to improve upon the concept of a blogroll by not just listing sites, but dynamically pulling recent headlines from them, and using some fun jQuery animation.

Create a login form for your WordPress sidebar


Recently, I heard many times about WordPress users which wanted to show a login form in their sidebar. If you want to do that, this plugin is for you. I haven’t tested it myself since I don’t want any login form in my sidebar, but it seems pretty good.

Customizing your WordPress Sidebar


Did you ever wanted to know how to style your sidebar widgets with background images or create a rollover effect on your rss feed image? If yes, you should read this excellent tutorial.

How to display Popular Post in your wordpress sidebar


Displaying popular posts on your sidebar is a good thing, because theses posts can make people staying longer on your blog. This article will teach you how to use plugins/widgets to display popular posts on your sidebar and customize it.

Enhanced Sidebars with Dynamic Content


Typically, most blogs will us a standard sidebar for the entire site. WordPress users have a lot of potential functionality that is rarely used in terms of creating various sidebars and displaying them in different situations. This excellent article from Vandelay Design discuss the fact that a static sidebar is boring, and helps you to create a dynamic sidebar. A must see!

73 resources on Best stuff tu put on your blog sidebar


To finish this list, here’s a list of 73 resources to put on your blog sidebar: Del.icio.us badges, adsense, last.fm charts…Almost everything for almost everyone.

Comments (43) - Leave yours

  4. Lincoln said:

    The tutorial for improving the blogroll looks the most useful! I want to add more links back to my friends’ sites on my blogroll but at the same time I don’t want it stretching a mile long either. Sheesh. The devs at WordPress should really incorporate the use of tabs here.

  7. MOin said:

    Excellent stuff i was really looking that how to make tabbed side bar to save some space and 73 things tu put on side is really awesome they are giving me great ideas, brilliant post worth a stumble thumb,

  8. Steven Snell said:

    I just clicked-through from Design Float because I thought this subject sounded interesting, so I was happy to find a link to one of my own posts. Thanks! Nice collection here. SIdebars often don;t get the attention they deserve (myself included).

  13. vot.eti.me said:

    8 excellent resources to enhance your WordPress sidebar…

    Sidebar is a very important part of your blog. Though, it can quickly look the same than in many other blogs. I’ve compilated 8 excellent resources to help you buid a better sidebar for your WordPress blog….

  16. Stephen Cronin said:

    Hi JBJ,

    Great post, yet again. There’s a few of these that I’ll be looking at sometime in future. I wasn’t a fan of tabs in the sidebar, bu the examples above make good sense, so I’ll revisit that too.

  17. jbj said:

    Hey Stephen, glad to see you on here! I’m not a fan a sidebar tabs either, but when you have a real lot of stuff, it is sometimes the only solution ;) .

  18. Web 2.0 Announcer said:

    8 excellent resources to enhance your WordPress sidebar…

    [...]Sidebar is a very important part of your blog. Though, it can quickly look the same than in many other blogs. I’ve compilated 8 excellent resources to help you buid a better sidebar for your WordPress blog.[...]…

  21. Zhu said:

    Lots of great resources to check out here! However, I think most Blogger put too many widgets and the like in their sidebar… I’d like to see things that are truly useful to readers.

    This is a great start!

  22. jbj said:

    @Zhu: Thanks for the compliments :) Indeed too much widgets are bad…It’s better to have less info, but which is read by your visitors ;)

  23. jbj said:

    @Free Janey: Thanks for letting me know about the Popular Posts plugins! Obviously too much DB requests + huge traffic isn’t that good! I never felt that my blog started to get sluggish even while being on Digg frontpage, though. My host might be great :)

  27. Stuartc said:

    Nice article i am new to wordpress just got my first blog set up…….

    This will help make it look a lot better just need some more time playing around.

  28. Shellie Kundinger said:

    Those resources are fantastic, I just wish bloggers in general would stick to only instally things in the sidebar that add real value to the reader. Maybe i am just partial to a lean sidebar, but for crying out loud they seem to get cluttered up with an awful amount of junk pretty quickly.

  31. Bishop Anders said:

    I’ve been wanting to create a blog for awhile, but debating between using wordpress or dreamweaver. It seems, from this blog and others, that wordpress would be a little easier but still be able to do all I need it to. Thanks for the info!

  34. Music Forum said:

    Very nice information. Thanks for this.
    There are some things that i cannot understand but i’ll try my best to understand :)

    But whatever it is! I am so thankful!

  35. 8 excellent resources to enhance your Wordpress sidebar | Green Tea Fat Burner said:

    [...] 8 excellent resources to enhance your WordPress sidebar Posted by root 3 hours ago (http://www.catswhocode.com) Sep 16 2008 is probably its height you put some ads your long blogroll how to display popular post in your wordpress sidebar your blog sidebar del icio us badges adsense last fm charts i 39 ve started building a blog since late regarding weight loss leave Discuss  |  Bury |  News | 8 excellent resources to enhance your WordPress sidebar [...]

  43. Aman said:

    Very nice post. All of the tricks are useful. Especially, i don’t have to look for different blogs and sidebars to enhance my own look. Thanks for sharing :)

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