The sidebar in your blog adds substantial functionality to your blog.  It allows you to include snippets of info, interactivity, links, and other useful features to your blog.  Most blogs have one sidebar, either left or right of blog content.  Some blogs have two sidebars, and these can either appear on the same side of the blog content or on opposite sides.  Fewer blogs have more than two sidebars, but these begin to be referred to as “three-column” or “four-column” blogs since the amount of space taken up by the sidebars drastically reduces the amount of space allocated for the blog content.  The number and layout of the columns are determined by the theme of the blog.  For the average end user, changing their sidebar number and layout is not really an option.

Back in the day… moving things around in the sidebar was tough and adding sections to the sidebar was nearly impossible as doing either required directly editing the sidebar.php file within the theme.  With the addition of widgets to WordPress, this has become a fairly simple process.  Widgets work within the sidebar with the WordPress default options and options generated by plugins that are installed to create a flexible and easily customizable sidebar.

To edit the side bar (in WordPress version 2.7 and higher), click on “Appearance” in the left column of the dashboard.

This will open a dropdown box where you will find the “Widgets” option.  Click “Widgets” access the sidebar editing tool. You can see that there is a column on the left that tells you what your available widgets are, a column in the center that has a description of the widgets, and a column on the right that shows you what widgets you are currently using.  The appearance of the “currently using” column is what determines how your sidebar looks on your blog.

To move a widget from the “available” column to the “current” column, click the word “Add” that is in button for the widget you wish to use.  For example, to add an RSS widget in the above example, you would click the word “Add” that is in the RSS button.  Most widgets have editable features in them, which can be accessed by clicking the word “Edit” in the widget button in the “Currently used” column.  For example, when you click “Edit” in the “Pages” widget in the example above, the button opens up with options to change the title, sort the pages, and exclude some pages.  Be sure to click “done” when finished editing a widget and “save changes” when finished editing your sidebar.

Widgets can also be used to add features that don’t come from plugins.  Some mapping features, social networking plugins, and other options will generate html code for you to insert into your blog.  To do so, simply add a “Text” widget, open the editing features, and paste the code into the text area.

These are the basics.  Let us know what other ideas or questions you have in the comments section.