Continuing our series on helpful WordPress plugins we use and recommend for our clients…

Widgets Reloaded

The built-in WordPress widgets are great, but were designed for simplicity and ease of use. If you want true control over the output of your widgets (like to exclude certain items, change the order, or display the results of a custom query) you need something more sophisticated. And that brings us to Widgets Reloaded, the wonderful little plugin that replaces the existing Archives, Bookmarks, Calendar, Categories, Pages, Search, and Tags widgets and also adds a new one called Authors. Each of these allow you to specify a wide range of parameters as if you were calling the individual functions directly from your template’s PHP code. The result is flexibility and control like never before. Non-coders beware. =)

Check out the Widgets Reloaded plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. As usual, don’t forget to donate to the author!

Next time we’ll cover Advanced Category Excluder, a great tool to help keep hidden categories from showing up in unwanted places.