Widgets – Stock Functionality Suffused with Seasoning

Myth: You need proprietary concepts such as “leaves” or “sections” to add fancy things to various locations on your site.
Fact: You need widgets – fundamental, functional, nice and feature-rich ones. Everything else is just bloatware.

Widgets, if coded nicely can be ported from theme to theme with minimal fuss. More importantly since they form a core WP construct, you can add them to pretty much any supporting area without any effort.

Suffusion gets this concept. Hence your Suffusion installation comes with many special widgets that make it easy to make your site look just the way you want. With its wide array of widget-capable areas you can add practically what you want where you want.

Featured Posts

A sleek and fully customizable way to bring your content into focus
Any self-respecting theme must offer you the capability to display a featured post slider. Suffusion goes a step beyond and offers the featured content bundled as a nice widget, so that you can use it in pretty much any widget-enabled area. Here is a gist of what you can do:

  • Pick categories, tags, sticky posts, latest posts, or even individual posts. The widget gives you an amazing level of control on what you can display.
  • Pick from an extensive level of effects to show your slide transitioning.
  • Take full charge over how your slider controls are shown: numeric indices, worded controls, or icons. Show the controls below the slides or over them.

Query Posts

Total control over what posts to pick and how to show them
Have you ever wished that your “Recent Posts” widget did a bit more? Like, display thumbnails? Or an excerpt? Or that it did more than just display recent posts? Suffusion’s “Query Posts” widget lets you do all of that and more:

  • Shows recent posts, random posts, posts in a category, posts with some tags, specific post formats etc.
  • Shows just the post titles, or thumbnails of varying sizes, or excerpts or full posts.
  • Displays all posts in one widget, or splits posts into their individual widgets.

Query Users

The perfect addition to your multi-contributor site
You run a WordPress site with multiple contributors and you want to display some highlights about them in a sidebar on your site. If so, the Query Users widget is your recourse. It offers rich functionality:

  • Displays users by access levels (Contributors, Editors etc.).
  • Shows simply the Avatars for your users, or displays additional information such as a description, the number of posts, comments etc.
  • Mixes display types as desired, showing only Avatars for some users and full details for others.

Child Pages

A great way to display nested content pertinent to the current page
So you only want the child pages of the current page to show up rather than all the pages in your site because you want to specifically highlight some related content. The Child Pages widget lets you do precisely that:

  • Displays all the child pages of the current page, including or excluding grandchildren as desired.
  • Shows thumbnails and small excerpts of each page.
  • Dynamically controls the title of the widget, and lets you hide the widget if no children are found.

Twitter

Your (Re)Tweets, displayed as you want them
Suffusion’s Twitter widget lets you display your tweets and handles re-tweets etc. differently from your own tweets. This makes use of the Twitter API rather than the search capability that typical themes tend to use (they don’t display tweets older than a week). There is a great deal of customization available in terms of the number of tweets, your badge etc.

  • Shows the profile picture of the person tweeting and that of the original tweeter in case of a re-tweet.
  • Lets you control how many tweets you want to display.

Follow Me

Let your readers access you via Social Media
The “Follow Me” widget lets you put up your links to a variety of Social Media networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Technorati), in addition to displaying a Feedburner subscription link for your site. What’s more, each social media network is suffused with choices of icons to use.

Flickr

A quick way to show off your Flickr stream
If you want to have an easy way to display your Flickr stream, look no further than the Flickr Widget that comes with the theme. Of course, for more full-featured Flickr integration capabilities there is always Photonic!

Others

There is a widget for Google Translator, in addition to the somewhat enhanced Meta widget and the Search widget. They are fairly self explanatory and easy to use.