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Step 3: More widgets If you scroll further down the page you’ll see how to add additional widgets to the pool of available widgets. This is especially useful for the text widgets, since you can put pretty much any text or HTML-based item in them and display them where you want on the sidebar, just like any other widget. Simply select the number you want on the dropdown box, and save. For one final example, we’ll arrange the widgets like so, with two text widgets:

SQL Security - $wpdb->prepare() Back in WordPress 2.3, the prepare() first emerged, initially unused… but there. The method was very experimental at the time and was not ready for prime-time so, though it was included, it was not yet used. We started to see its emergence in WordPress 2.5 and in WordPress 2.6 it is being used just about everywhere.

Shift-Click Selection of Multiple Checkboxes in WP-Admin As the backend of WordPress continues to evolve after the release of the drastically redesigned admin in WP 2.5, usability enhancements are also making their way in.

More Avatar Options With the Automattic acquisition of Gravatar last year, in-built support for Gravatars was introduced in WordPress 2.5. WordPress 2.6 gives the blogger more options by allowing for selection of the “default” avatar. Out of the box, the default Gravatar can be “Mystery Man”, a generic grey avatar with a white silhouette of someone. Default avatars can also be “blank” (self-explanatory), the Gravatar logo, Identicons, Wavatars or MonsterIDs. These have all been a part of WordPress.com for some time and now come to the rest of us. For more information, Matt wrote a post for the WP.com community that you should probably check out. The difference here being, of course, that WordPress.com offers “dashboard avatars” and WPFROU (WordPress for the Rest of Us) does not include this functionality.

Page Templates over XML-RPC In addition to the XML-RPC/APP security measures listed above, a new key bit of functionality has now been exposed for API editors (and also, if you think about it, demonstrates the power behind XML-RPC and why you might want to turn it off if you don’t use it). The XML-RPC interface now allows for managing page templates from an API editor. To the best of my knowledge, no editor supports this yet and may not. However, increasingly there is the ability to remotely post content from places like YouTube, Utterz and others. None of these services would have any real use for this functionality either, however I want to point out that because they can post remotely anything that is exposed to the remote world can also be managed.

Press This Press this! is a new enhancement of a long-existing concept. Bookmarklets. In fact, WordPress used to have a bookmarklet included that would allow a user to quickly start a new post from the browser toolbar, but the functionality was limited.

Integrated Theme Preview Theme previewing has been a bugaboo for many a theme designer. How do we check and develop without affecting the rest of the site. Some folks resorted to using Ryan’s venerable Theme Preview plugin. Others setup a beta version of a site that was sandboxed off from the rest of the world. Lots of different approaches, all of which remain valid.

Plugin Management Overhaul Finally, the plugin management interface has received a face-lift and some added functionality. Active plugins and inactive plugins are segregated and with that new fangled Shift-click functionality I talked about before, plugin management just got really freaking simple. Note that Active plugins can be deactivated in bulk and Deactivated plugins can be activated or even deleted in bulk. Clean up that stale plugin list in a snap. But… there’s always a but… make a backup before you go nuts.