Are you thinking of using a plugin that uses shortcodes?  Do you want to be able to use a shortcode in your blog’s sidebar instead of your post or page? Well, if the answer to both those questions is “Yes” then you have come to the right place!

You can manage multiple sidebar widgets in WordPress. To do so, you go to the Widgets page in the Admin, and select the Sidebar you want to manage. If you have 1 widgetized sidebar, the name “Sidebar 1″ is not a big deal for managing it. But what if you have 5 or more, and they’re named Sidebar 1, Sidebar 2, etc. Ah yes, now what was that wily sidebar 3 for?

I will show you how you can use widgets on two or more sidebars.

In this post, I am going to walk you through on what you need to know to ‘widgetize’ your blog’s theme, meaning we first have to allow your blog’s theme to use widgets.

When I first heard of WordPress widgets, I was appropriately disgruntled. ‘Widgets? We don’t need no stinking Widgets,’ I grumbled. I was resistant towards the notion of widgetizing my themes because it meant having to change my style of design from using divs to separate the content in my sidebar to placing everything in an unordered list.

I was recently contacted by a reader of this blog who needed help with installing the MyBlogLog widget that displays on this site, into his own blog. So, I decided to write it up as a blog post to explain to him and anyone else that might be wondering.