Widgets are an easy way for you to arrange and rearrange your sidebar to your hearts content without touching a line of code. We first launched WordPress Widgets (WPW) it on WordPress.com a month ago and the response was great. Now we’re ready to release the plugin to the world. If adoption goes well, we’ll consider rolling it into the next version of WordPress.
You can find out more information and download the plugin on the new Widgets page.
If you’re a developer, writing a WordPress Widget is as easy as a plugin and we’ve even documented all the APIs for you, as well as including guides for theme authors and current plugin authors.
What’s the potential audience for widgets? In addition to the 130,000+ blogs on WordPress.com, you have the potential to tap in to the 5,000 people downloading WordPress every single day and the hundreds of thousands of existing WordPress blogs out there.