Here are some WordPress links that I thought our readers may find useful.  They were all published over the past couple weeks.  Enjoy!

• 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.

Like many other bloggers, I display 125*125 pixels ads on my blog, and earn some money with it. Currently, I own 6 different ads, and most of them change every week. I became bored of editing my sidebar template everyday, so I asked my friend X-OR to write a cool widget to manage thoses ads. Let’s review it together.

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 don’t have a lot of coding knowledge, you probably find that you use widgets a lot for your sidebar content.  I know many bloggers have come to rely on widgets and now WordPress 2.5 has changed some things.

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.

As the premium WordPress themes market continues to grow and competition becomes more intense, it is only natural to begin looking towards the future of premium WordPress themes. We all have different opinions of what that future holds, but one thing that is for sure. Widgets are going to play a huge role in the future of these themes.

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.

Previously I talked a bit about How To: Add Widget Support To Your WordPress Theme.  Since WordPress 2.2 was released, offering widget support has become a basic requirement for any WordPress theme to become successfully received by the WordPress community. 

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 are planning on making a WordPress theme available to the WordPress community, it has become somewhat of a necessity for it to support widgets. This is especially true now that recent WordPress installs now come with this ability built-in, meaning you no longer need a plugin to accomplish this. This will make your theme more appealing to a larger number of WordPress users because they will not need any coding knowledge to set up their sidebar to look how they want it to.

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.