WordPress Tutorial – Use a Text Widget to Customize Sidebar

LATEST TUTORIALS: mcbuzz.wordpress.com CODE FOR THIS TUTORIAL HERE mcbuzz.wordpress.com This Intermediate level WordPress tutorial shows how to use a text widget to customize a WordPress sidebar. To see the final product of the tutorial in the Business Blogging 101 website and the HTML code used in this example, go to mcbuzz.wordpress.com and search for “text widget”. Widgets are a very useful feature of most new WordPress themes. These are called “widget enabled” or “widgetized” themes or “widget enabled” or “widgetized” sidebars. They allow you to add custom content to your sidebars with little or no knowledge of HTML or other code. In an earlier tutorial, I showed how to add Flickr photos to a WordPress sidebar using the Flickr photo widget. The example I use in this tutorial shows how to create a custom text box with a short biographical note and part of that text is a link. In PART TWO of this tutorial, I show how to insert an image into the same custom sidebar box, along with a LinkedIn profile “badge”. You can use these techniques to put whatever you want into your own WordPress sidebar.

WordPress themes and spam and virus?

I stumbled across a magazine online called smashing magazine- www.smashingmagazine.com- they offer all these free wordpress themes- I like alot of them but I am afraid to download because I don’t want any viruses on my computer- however, they state that "all themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks." Does anybody know what that means? Does that mean they test for spam/virus?

What is a good simple, preferable open source, reporting tool?

I’m looking for a simple (*easy* to install and use) reporting tool to generate some simple reports. I need the ability to automate report generation and reports will need simple graphics (pie chart, bar graph) and ability to include logo graphics. Open source or free wold be best, but cheap would be ok too as we’re a small biz. Our data is generated on FreeBSD systems and our client machines are all Win XP so probably best if it’s XP based. Thanks.