Sidebar Widgets
When you create an OM4 Community website (OM4Tourism, OM4Business), you have access to a number of sidebar widgets.
This pages summarises what each sidebar widget does. Note in some cases a widget only becomes available when you activate the corresponding plugin, so if you aren’t seeing a widget, check your Plugins page first.
Some sidebar widgets are only available for OM4 Premium sites, they are listed separately at the end.
| Archives | Lists blog posts by month. You can configure the title of the widget, whether to show the post count for each month, and whether to display your archives in full or as a drop down. |
| Aweber | Adds a signup form to an Aweber email list. Create a web form in Aweber first and copy details, use them to configure this widget. You can have more than one Aweber widget. |
| Calendar | Displays a calendar for the current month, any day that has a post associated with it is highlighted. Clicking on a brings up up all posts made on that day. |
| Categories | Displays a list or your blog categories. You can configure the title of the widget, and whether to show the list in full, or as a dropdown list. You can also choose to show post counts, and whether to show the category hierarchy (sub categories under parent categories) or not. |
| Del.icio.us | Adds Del.icio.us links to your site. Activate the Del.icio.us plugin and add the Del.icio.us widget to your sidebar. You can configure the title of the widget, the username you want to display links from and number of links to display. You can also configure whether to display timestamps and tags, and whether to filter or exclude certain tags. |
| Feature Articles | Displays summarys of feature articles. Activate Feature Articles plugin and setup articles in Dashboard, Feature Articles. This widget displays the article snippet for a random feature article each time a new page is displayed. You can configure the title of the widget. You can set an optional Tag / Subject for the widget - if set, it will only select from articles with that Tag/Subject. Below the article snippet are two links - one to the full text of the article, and another to a page that shows the title and snippet of all feature articles in the set. |
| Feedburner | Link for your blog and your RSS feed. If you subscribe to Feedburner and activate Email, after you register your Feedburner details using Site Design, this widget will automatically provide an email subscription field to allow visitors to subscribe to your blog by email. |
| Links | Links from your your Blogroll. If you have more than one category of links, each category is displayed in its own group. The category name is always used as the title of each group. |
| Meta | Site Admin link (links to your Dashboard), Login/Logout link, and RSS links to subscribe to blog posts and comments. Also a link to Wordpress.org. Not recommended. Login and Dashboard links are in the OM4 footer, and RSS feeds are handled elsewhere. |
| Pages | Link to each page and sub page defined for your site. You can define the title of the widget, and how the pages sort (Page Order uses the Order field defined under Manage, Pages). You can configure the exclusion of individual pages by entering their Page Ids. |
| Polls | Polls allow you to set questions and for visitors to vote. Activate the WP-Polls and WP-Polls Widget plugins. Setup Polls in the Polls menu (top level menu in your Dashboard). Once you have setup one or more Polls, use the Polls widget to add them to your sidebar. You can configure the title of the widget, and whether to display a link to your Polls Archive. You can configure the widget to show your latest poll, a random poll, multiple polls. Or to display a simple How Is My Site poll. Note: before you can display a Polls Archive, you need to read the article on how to setup your Polls Archive for first time use. |
| Popular Searches | Successful searches on your site. Activate the Seach Meter plugin first. This widget displays a list of the most popular successful search terms in the last month. You can configure the number of popular searches shown. |
| Recent Comments | Recent comments made on your posts. You can configure the title of the widget, and to display between 1 and 15 comments. |
| Recent Posts | Titles of your most recent posts. You can configure title of this widget, and set the number of posts displayed from 1 and 15. |
| Recent Searches | Recent successful searches. Activate the Seach Meter plugin first. This widget displays a list of the most recent successful search terms in the last month. You can configure the number of recent searches shown. |
| RSS | Headlines from any RSS feed. Use this plugin to show headlines from someone else’s blog, for example using http://wordpress.com/feed will display recent posts from Wordpress.com. |
| Search | Search your site. Displays a Search form to allow visitors to search your site. |
| Sonific Songspot | Streamed music for your website. Signup to an account with Sonific (sonific.com) and choose your favourite music. Activate the Sonfific Songspot plugin, and add the Sonific widget to your sidebar. |
| Sub Page Menu | Links to sub pages. Displays a list of any sub pages that belong to the current page. Most commonly used in combination with Custom Menu entries, as visitors can navigate to parent pages using the menu bar, and the sub pages for that parent are automatically displayed in the sidebar. |
| Tag Cloud | List of the tags you have used for your posts, the more times the tag is used the larger it appears. |
| Testimonials | Randomly selected testimonial. Activate the WP-Testimonials plugin first and use Dashboard, Manage, Testimonials to enter your testimonials. This widget displays a randomly selected testimonial each time a new page is loaded. At the bottom of the testimonial is a link to allow the visitor to read all testimonials. |
| Text | Text widgets enable you to use free text, so you can include text, links, images and many other types of content. You can have multiple text widgets on your site. You can configure the title of the widget and the text of the widget. In the text, you can use the allowable HTML tags shown below. For security reasons, you cannot use Javascript, forms or input tags - they will be automatically filtered.
Allowable HTML tags: address, a, abbr, acronym, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, cite, class, code, col, del, dd, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, img, ins, kbd, li, p, pre, q, s, span, strike, strong, sub, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, tr, tt, ul, ol, var |
Sidebar Widgets available with OM4 Premium Sites
| MyBlogLog | Integrates MyBlogLog in sidebar. If you create an account with MyBlogLog and activate the MyBlogLog plugin, you add this widget to your sidebar. |