of HOW to use widgets would be appreciated since this is an introductory tutorial. I am unable to get a widget I created to work properly. I followed the example in this article. The widget shows up just fine in the backend's Appearence=&gt;Widgets screen and I am able to drag it to one of my sidebars. What happens is that the widget's output is not showing up on the front end (and I checked the HTML source and there is no sign of if it at all, not even the tags generated from the $before_widget and $after_widget variables). I checked apache's error_log for possible PHP error messages. Nada. What also happens is if I navigate someplace else on the back end and then navigate back to the widget screen, the widget has vanished from the sidebar. I have been staring at this code for hours and hours and cannot see what is wrong. Thanks to your post I've been able to create a widget to display a mini catalog. Which is working nicely. And once again, I've learned a boatload from dissecting your code. Even though you don't document it, the translation __() form was an invaluable lesson. Now, I'd like to learn one more thing, namely how to add user controlable styling to the widget without without the user having to edit style.css so it is portable from theme to theme without having to alter the theme files. Since there's no HTML section, how would one go about adding