8 excellent resources to enhance your Wordpress sidebar
Posted by jbj on Sep 16, 2008 in wordpress • 28 commentsSidebar 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.
wow, more sleepless nights…..
i am a newbie to wordpress. nice article, very interesting and informative read.
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.
Nice List!
Thanks for adding my little article.
Nuno.
Hey thanks for this. My side bar is kinda suckin’, I’ll need to check some of this stuff out and give it a face lift.
Matt
Good job, thanks a lot ! You give me new ideas…
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,
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).
@Steven Snell: Thanks for the compliment. Your blog is very good, I read your rss feed
In the “Best stuff tu put on your blog sidebar” I particularly like the ClickMyBut plugin. looks like a must have
All kidding aside, great resource post.
I am really newbie into this, thanks for this post, i will try to learn more on wordpress.
Great resource on the enhancement to sidebar. Design of a website often gives the first impression of whether people will read your content or not. Thanks for this.
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.
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 ;).
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!
@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 
Great selection, however, the popular post plugin can be a drain on your sites resources if it is hammered with traffic - i had an article on digg and after analysing my server stats i found that the plugin is waaay database connection heavy - started to get sluggish with so many visitors… thought i’d let you know
@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
Excellent. Thank You.