Widget is a good thing.
Widgets are things you can put in your WordPress blog’s sidebar without knowing how to edit a web page.
As it said, it’s good to have a widgetized sidebar if you don’t know how to edit a web page. But let’s see:
A developer said:
- Widget creates additional process on the server, no matter how efficient the code is.
- Developing a widgetized sidebar element takes much longer time than hardcoding it.
- There’s no way a widget can integrate smoothly into all available WordPress themes.
While from a user’s point of view:
- It’s nice that I can edit my sidebar from within the admin section.
- Almost all of the widgets I downloaded, doesn’t display correctly on my custom theme.
- Widgets, no matter how small, puts more burden to the server.
Is widget really necessary?
If you ask me, no! (at least for now)
- Unless I need to rearrange my sidebar elements everyday, it’s easier to do it directly on the template file.
- Even if I develop a sidebar by the standards, most widgets will still need some (code) adjustments before it can displayed correctly.
I’m not saying that widgets are bad. In fact, I love technological improvements like this that can make people’s life easier. But for now, I don’t go with it.
It takes a minute to rearrange sidebar elements. Takes less than an hour to do structural or formatting changes. But it could take hours to develop a widgetized sidebar element, just to make its formattings and structure editable from the admin section.