Widgets: It’s a Plugin!

Let me begin by thanking the bloggers of WordPress.com. These excellent people are our most diligent (and unwitting) testing force, keeping our days free for the development of new bugs which, after enduring the careful, methodical abuse from our tireless testing force, eventually metamorphose into features.

Some of these young features are lucky enough to be released into the wild as plugins for anyone to capture and put to work in their own WordPress blogs on server farms all over the world. A plugin is happy in its toil and this makes us very proud parents!

We know, sadly, that some copies will stray into the dark corners of the web where vicious, hungry coders lurk, waiting to rip them up and sometimes reassemble them into towering, plug-necked monsters. Do not pity these copies! Their lives are not wasted, for this what the developer intended. We encourage mutation, even if it causes angry mobs to gather with pitchforks and torches. This, too, makes a parent proud.

Of special interest today is a new sidebar customization plugin called Widgets. Thousands of people are already using Widgets on their WordPress.com blogs (we keep track) and daily we receive requests to bring Widgets to the public, as we have promised to do all along.

The plugin named Widgets has come of age. It is now a plugin for all to enjoy. You can download it, read the documentation, update your themes and make new widgets like rabbits in the springtime.