the page and if I reload the widget page, it has disappeared from the sidebar. The widget is exactly like your example widget, which of course works perfectly. Any ideas what could cause behaviour like this? I have bookmarked this post as I will have to read this a couple of times and try and test to see if it works. I would like to create my own widgets as some plugin developers don't have widgets for the work. Justin, thanks for the explanation "for dummies" -- I really needed it. It seems that WP lacks of better function description and documentation overall... I deal a lot with Drupal, have to say that their API documentation service seems much superior to me than WP. Anyway, I'm kinda stuck with updating my own plugin to be compatible with the 2.8 -- new widget instances showing up in widgetized areas just fine, but the existing widgets (created in previous WP version) don't show up and I have no clue why. I output the var_dump for the get_option("my_widget") and can see all the existing and the new widgest arrays, but only the new ones show up in the widgets section and the front end. Seems like I can't even grab their $instance(s). Any thoughts on this? Thanks for a great guide! I started my first wordpress widget this week with another template that unfortunately wasn't ready for the 2.8 widget api changes. But in about an hour I transferred over the work I