The Power Of Widgets

Movable Type 4's widget system may seem a little bit confusing at first, however it's not that daunting once you get your head around it.

Widgets are like snippets of code. You can have lots of widgets that do lots of different things.

For example, on several of the MT powered sites that I manage I use the widgets to handle my Google Adsense and other affiliate banners / buttons.

By using a widget to hold the code I can achieve several things:

• The widget is self-contained, so if I need to update the code I don't have to poke through lots of different templates - I just update it in one place
• You can move the widgets around ie. decide which one displays first in a widget set
• You can remove a feature by simply removing the widget from its parent set

On a another site we're using the widgets for things like "useful links" and "blog rolls".

They're handy!

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