Today I’m going to share with you the best WordPress widgets that I would recommend for each and every WordPress blogger. I personally use a few widgets on my blog to help my visitors easily browse all of my blog posts. A nice WordPress blog would have proper utilization of widgets, plugins and footer & header bars.

When I started blogging I had lots of widgets in my blog’s sidebar and never really bothered worrying about the performance of the blog. All I wanted was to make my blog look cool. But one fine day lightning struck me and I decided to delete most of the WordPress plugins and widgets which were not necessary to my blog and were intense on bandwidth and resources. Having lot of plugins and widgets on my blog resulted in too much bandwidth consumption and made my blog sluggish, bringing down my site’s overall performance. So keep in mind, too much of something can be as detrimental as too little. A slow website or blog can equal unhappy visitors and a low score for your site’s search engine ranking. A smaller number of widgets means less content visible on your blog to the visitors, ultimately leading to a high bounce rate and/or low page views.  The solution is to find a way to balance the two.

Do not confuse yourselves with widgets and plugins though. WordPress plugins are easy to install and activate which helps you to improve your blog’s functionality. Plugins can include widgets as well. Widgets on the other hand are visible and interactive to your visitors. Usually these widgets are shown in the sidebar, but are not limited to only the sidebar. Fortunately there are many themes available now with widgetized footer and header space.

Here are my favorite WordPress widgets:

• WordPress Popular Posts : This widget is really awesome and useful for me and for my visitors. For me, I can display my most popular posts to my visitors. For my visitors, it helps them to easily find the posts that are the most popular.
• Related Posts: There are many related posts plugins available in WordPress Plugins directory. I prefer to use one that is simple and does not have many features allowing me to show related posts in the post footer as well as in the sidebar at the top of my website.
• My Random Posts: I use this plugin whenever I feel like I have not posted for ages. Apart from showing popular and recent posts, I choose to display random posts on my blog as well. It helps reviving older posts which new readers may have missed. Visitors can find your posts that might be interesting for them without going to sitemap page.
• Recent Posts: I use this widget on single page only. Widget logic gives you the ability to decide which widget to show your readers. On my website I have set up the recent post widget to only display recent posts in the sidebar when readers are viewing a single post page.  
• Search Engine Keywords Related Posts: I came across this widget recently and find it very useful. It displays related posts based upon the keyword your blog’s visitor used in the search engine. It has its own way of detecting similar posts. But combining it with Widget logic makes it a good widget to have.
• Archives: Usually it’s a good idea to have an archive page setup instead of having a sidebar widget. But since I wanted to have a minimalist look of my blog I decided to add archives in my sidebar widget. It’s easy and available through WordPress.
• Search widget: This widget comes as a standard feature in most WordPress themes however it’s a built in widget as well in WordPress. It’s important to have a search widget on your blog to let people search for anything if they can’t find it on your blog.
• Ad Squares Widgets: I am really fond of images and I like to include as many images as possible on my posts. This widget is used to add 125×125 ad blocks in your sidebar. There are 2 things that I like about this widget. First, you can add as many widgets as you want in your sidebar. Secondly, you can have up to 12 125×125 blocks configured per widget. You can use image or html code in the space, so AdSense would work very well!
• PHP-Code: I like this one because it lets me execute PHP Code as well in my sidebar apart from Text and HTML. For example, if you want to display recent posts from a specific category, you can do that with the PHP code available on the web. There are various other things you can do with the codes available.
• Recent Comments: Recent comments widget is as useful as recent posts widget. It keeps your visitors engaged by checking on the recent discussion on your blog.
• Text: This built-in widget allows you to add any text or HTML code in your sidebar widget. It’s useful to those small announcements you want to make every now and then with some links and text.
• Feedburner e-mail Widget: Feedburner is the most widely used email subscription service in the world. To get your visitors subscribe to your feeds via email, you can use this widget.
• Custom Menu: Another great addition to WordPress 3.0, the introduction of custom menus. As soon as you add a custom menu in the admin panel, you can add the menu item in the sidebar through widget called Custom Menu. The Custom Menu widget lets you add posts, links, category links and pages combined in to a single widget. Great potential combined with Widget logic. I use it to highlight my greatest posts on my blog coupled with the Widget Logic widget.
• Latest Tweets: Twitter is big and is getting bigger day by day. Every blogger in the blogosphere is now connected with twitter. The latest Tweets widget will show your recent tweets on your blog out of the box.
• WP-Cumulus: I don’t use this widget anymore as I am concentrating on having a minimalist blog design, however I wanted to share it here. This widget works on Flash and tends to eat up resources. In case you are okay with a slightly increased load time then its one widget that you must have. WP-Cumulus allows you to display your site’s tags, categories or both using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D. It works just like a regular tags cloud, but is more visually exciting. Clicking the tags can be a little hard (depending on your speed setting) but does take you to the appropriate page.

Feel free to add any WordPress widgets you feel I missed in the comments below. I will do my best to update this post to reflect the best widgets provided in the comments!

Since that time no one else has really attacked the widget angle the way Shifter did…..at least until now.   After over 2 months of production and quite a few beta testers (myself included), I am excited to share with our readers that iThemes has released what is probably their best theme yet, the Flexx Theme.

This theme comes with over 1,000 possible layout combinations!   Other Flexx features include:

• Rotating Header Images – Easily upload your new header images and set the Flash-like transition effects
• Contact Form Page Template – The custom image uploader feature allows you to personalize your site with your own logo
• Plug and Play Graphic Changes – Easily change the look of your site by uploading new background images (setting every different combo with it) and setting the color through a Photoshop-like color picker.
• Menu Builder – Pick and choose what Pages you want in the menu navigation, including subpages.
• Search Engine Optimization – As with all our themes, we’ve built it to get you the best exposure in the search engines, and include a SEO panel to tweak some basic settings.
• Multiple Color Styles – This first series comes in two pre-built color styles (Bold and Canvas), but it has a rockin’ feature that lets you easily upload new background images (setting every different combo with it) and setting the color through a Photoshop-like color picker.
• Drop down navigation menu

To get an idea of one of the 1,000+ possibilities available, you can check out the Flexx demo.   Here are a couple screen shots:

Flexx Homepage

Flexx Post Page

The best part about the new Flexx theme is the price!  It falls under the iThemes standard pricing model of $79.95 for a single-use license and $249.95 for the developer’s license.  iThemes 2008 theme club members of course get this theme for free.

What do you think of this incredible theme?   Anyone else think that widget-based themes might be the future or the premium WordPress themes market?

• How to Display Page Children on the Parent Page – WPLover provides some code you can use to place links to your page children on the parent page.   This is a nice idea for your themes sidebar.
• 5 Plugins to Secure Your WordPress Blog – Our friend Jean of Cats Who Code who published a great list of WordPress plugins that help you secure your WordPress installation.
• Links in a WordPress Sidebar Text Widget – This post by WordPress Max provides the code and explains how to create a sidebar text widget.
• How To Build a Featured Post Section in WordPress – Net Tuts has written a great tutorial explaining how you can build a featured post section into your WordPress blog.
• Theme Hybrid – Justin Tadlock releases his much anticipated “free” themes club with an option for an exclusive membership for $25.00.

What the Show125 widget can do for your blog

I always loved the concept of widgets: drap n’ drop, easy to edit, easy to place, easy to remove. Most of todays themes can handle widgets, so there’s many chances that the theme you use haven’t any problem with it.

In addition to the basic widgets advantages, Show125 gives you many option and a true control over your ads. Let’s see:

• Display from 1 to 8 ads
• Available in English (default) or French
• Display all your ads together, or in an eye-candy Mootools slideshow
• Optionally add the target=”_blank” attribute to links, if you want ads to open in a new tab.
• Show (or not) a title for your ads block
• Easy to install
• Clean code
• Add custom css class to links for styling it your way
• And more!

Installation

Nothing hard here: First, download the widget. If you want to see a “live demo”, just have a look at x-or’s blog, where you’ll be able to see the slideshow mode of the widget.

Once you unzipped the widget to your hard drive, upload the entire directory to your wp-content/plugins directory. Then, go to your WordPress administration panel and activate the plugin.

In Design » Widgets, you’ll be able to drag n drop the Show125 widget to your sidebar (or any other widgetized part of your WP theme) and set the options.

Once you filled the fields and saved your changes, you’ll see your ads in your sidebar. Managing your ads with Show125 really makes money earning easier!

If you would like to learn how to use widgets in WordPress 2.5+, I recommend you check out the WordPress 2.5 Sidebar Widgets Guide over at WordPress Max.  He does a good job of getting you used to the new look and feel of the new WordPress widgets system.

The first theme that appears to be focused completely around widgets is the Shifter WordPress theme, which features a fully customizable dashboard with widgets for pretty much everything.

Here are two screen shots:

My buddy Jeffro of Jeffro2pt0 is one of those guys that is always ahead of the times. If you’d like to see an example of what Shifter can do, I recommend you check out his website. He switched to Shifter awhile ago and hasn’t looked back. You can also read his explanation for “shifting” to Shifter.

Sound interesting? You can purchase Shifter for $79.95 for a single-use copy, $99.95 for a single-use copy with support from the author, advanced copy is $199.95, and the developer’s package is $999.95.

If you’d like to learn more, I recommend you check out Shifter’s website.

Recently I ran across a great post by Quick Online Tips which also does a great job of showing you how to widget-enable WordPress themes in 3 easy steps.  They’ve taken the time to break it down so anyone can easily update their theme to include widgets.  I recommend checking it out if you’d like to update your theme to support widgets.

If you would like to set up your theme to support widgets, I recommend you check out this post by Garry Conn entitled How To Widgetize a WordPress Theme. In his post, he provides a detailed walk through of how to widgetize your sidebar for a 2-column theme.

According to Automattic, it is also really easy to add widget support to 3-column and 4-column themes:

Instead of register_sidebar() you should use register_sidebars(n) where n is the number of sidebars. Then place the appropriate number in the dynamic_sidebar() function, starting with 1. (There are several other ways to use these function. See the API). You can even give your sidebars names rather than numbers, which lets you maintain a different set of saved sidebars for each theme.

My favorite part about widgets is that it provides a extra option for theme users, but isn’t required to be used.  A theme that supports widgets can still be adjusted manually if you prefer to do things the hard fun way.