Quick Tip: Add a Widget to WordPress

Originally published
Note: This article was published while I was in my early 20s. I was much younger and dumber. Please don't hold it against me. One of the perils of having a 20+ year old website!

A couple of weeks ago I was working on a WordPress site and thought it might be nice to add a simple widget that allows the user to place my bit of code anywhere in the sidebar they’d like. Here I’ll show you how to add a simple widget to WordPress.

Create the Callback Function

First we need to create the function. We will create a simple hello world function.

function jlc_hello_world(){
    print "<h3>Hello World!</h3>";
}

I’ve appended “jlc_” to the beginning so it doesn’t override any other WordPress function. Now with the function written, let’s widgetize it!

Making it a Widget

To make it a widget, we need the WordPress function register_sidebar_widget($title, $callback_function). We will add this line above our hello world function, using “Hello World Widget” and the name of our function as the argument. So we have:

register_sidebar_widget('Hello World Widget', 'jlc_hello_world');

And all of our code, which will go in the theme’s function.php file (or in your plugin file):

register_sidebar_widget('Hello World Widget', 'jlc_hello_world');
function jlc_hello_world(){
    print "<h3>Hello World!</h3>";
}

That’s it! Your widget has no options, but maybe that’s something I could cover in a different post.