Just a few hours ago I learned to know through wordpress.com, that the great side bar widgets facility they have published at their blog service platform the other days is now available as a separate and free plugin.

That widget facility is a great enhancement for the most convenient blog layout setup one can imagine, if you keep in mind that there are people out there who don’t talk PHP and HTML as fluently as their native languages It incorporates a simple drag and drop area, where you can configure your sidebar design by simply dragging and dropping the different available sidebar areas in place just where you want them to stay.

But the most exciting part of this is the way these widgets are integrated into the system: you just download and extract them as any other usual plugin! The only difference is that they rely on an installed and activated instance of the widgets plugin, and if activated, they are available for the sidebar, that’s it!

I fell in love with this widgets thingy the day I saw the dropzone the first time at wordpress.com (you know, you need an account there if you want to make use of akismet or the SK2 akismet plugin), and I really wanted this stuff available for the public - and this day has come. But, and that’s the great news the Binary Blue community is waiting for:

Binary Blue will be Widgets compliant with the upcoming 1.1.0 release!

I have them already running here onsite, which - for my very sorry - involved certain changes to the HTML code of the theme and some as well hard changes in the schemes’ CSS files, so don’t worry if something’s looking petty the next days - I’m probably working on the CSS for the very scheme you’re using when you visit this site. Part two of the great news: I’ll look which parts of the special Binary blue sidebar are designated to end up in new widgets, and if appropriate, I’ll publish these widgets as separate downloads for the upcoming Widgets community as well. So don’t miss out on the upcoming release and leave me a note if anything’s broken here onsite, so I can fix it as fast as possible.