December 14, 2009 Here are some fantastic widgets that you will love and find instantly useful! Who doesn’t love the ease of install, drag and drop? It can be quite a hunt to find widgets that are WPMU-compatible when you’re looking to add a little bit of functionality without having to try four or five plugins that do basically the same thing. All of the plugins listed below are WPMU-compatible and will save you loads of time in customizing your blogs. Some are widgets that are routinely requested in WPMU help forums and others you many not have heard of yet, but all have been selected because they contain configurable widgets that can be added to widgetized areas of your themes.
Recently Created Blogs Widget
Of course you can show your recently created blogs with a little bit of PHP, but Brajesh Singh of Thinking In WordPress has made it easy with this free widget. You can download it, pop it into your sidebar and instantly be showing your most recently created blogs. Make sure you have decent splog protection operating on your site, or this widget will draw immediate attention to how many splogs are getting through. ;)
Download Here
Twitter Friends Widget
Install this fun little WPMU-compatible widget that displays your Twitter Tools & Apps friends/ followers in your sidebar in the same way that they appear on your Twitter homepage.
Download Here
WPMU Featured Blog Widget
The settings for this widget allow you to select a featured blog from your WPMU blog network and display its recent posts, as well as the author’s avatar. It’s very handy for for showcasing some of the best content from your WPMU site.
Download Here
Ad Widget
This plugin allows you to simply deploy multiple widgets, each with different rules for showing ads e.g. one widget can show ads only to IE users and another can show ads only to search visitors
Download Here
Featured Blog Tag Cloud
This widget allows users to create a tag cloud from any WPMU blog in the install. Users may also configure font size, unit of measure, number of tags, sort, order, included tags, and excluded tags.
Download Here
Skype Online Status
What can you do with this? Skype Online Status allows you to create unlimited, highly customizable and accessible Skype buttons through widgets, post quicktags and/or template tags. There are buttons to invoke normal phone calls, multichats or conference calls.
Download Here
Add to Any: Subscribe Button
This widget gives blog readers the option to subscribe using any feed reader, such as Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Netvibes, Windows Live, and all other RSS readers. The widget comes with AddToAny’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history.
Download Here
Author Avatars
This plugin displays a list of author avatars on your WPMU blog. It is easily configured to show a custom title, only show specific user groups or hide certain users, limit the number of users shown, change and sort order of users or show random order, adjust the size of the avatars, show users from the current blog or all blogs, and group users by their blog.
Download Here
Post Google Map
This plugin allows you to add multiple addresses to a post/page and have those addresses automatically plotted on a Google Map in a sidebar widget. This is a great plugin to help localize your stories, events, news, etc.
Download Here
NextGEN Public Uploader
This is an extension plugin for the NextGEN Gallery plugin that allows users to upload images from the frontend of your blog to a specified gallery. All images uploaded by your visitors must be moderated before being displayed in your NextGen Gallery. It’s an excellent way to encourage live participation on news items or for creating a family or organization group gallery, where all can submit pictures.
Download Here
Visitor Maps and Who’s Online
This is a very robust geolocation tool to add to your WPMU installation. It displays visitor maps with location pins, city, and country. This plugin also includes a Who’s Online Sidebar to show how many users are online and additionally an admin dashboard widget to show Who’s Online and view visitor details. The visitor details include: what page the visitor is on, IP address, host lookup, online time, city, state, country, geolocation maps and more. The best part is that no API key is needed!
Download Here
Recent Global Posts Widget:
This widget shows recent post from your blogs sitewide. You can also display avatars and configure the widget’s display for the length of the title, excerpt, and avatar sizes.
Download Here
Sarah Gooding on Google+
Thanks Sarah for including Recently Created Blogs Widget. I hope it helps the blog owners :)
Where is the download link for “Post Google Map”?
Oops. Just added it. :) Thanks for catching that!
Thanks, I’ve really found your articles here helpful!
Fantastic post, especially excited about the NextGen public upload, could be very interesting especially when used with a great plugin like TDO Mini Forms.
Thanks Sarah! Coming soon to Post Google Map… WPMU network-wide map plots!
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is there a setting on WPMU that allows or restricts widgets to be seen and used on member blogs? how do you control widget use within the wpmu environment?
Thank you for this very good tips. Especially for integration of zlib!