I have seen some good tutorials on creating widgets for WordPress 2.8 floating around the WordPress-o-Sphere. But, I didn't feel any of them really covered practical usage. I want to show you how to create a widget for real-world development using WordPress 2.8?s new widget class. In this tutorial, I'll walk you through the steps of setting up a widget, its settings form, and displaying it on your site. At the end of the tutorial, you can download an example plugin to build from. Of course, you can apply this to your themes as well. If you don't feel like reading through the tutorial, skip to the end and download the example widget. It's heavily commented and will give you a good base to build from. What will the example widget do? For the sake of the tutorial, we'll be creating something extremely simple, yet you'll see some advanced techniques on how to give users more control over the display of the widget through the widget controls. Our widget will display a person's name and sex. The controls will allow for the input of a widget title (text input), the input of the user's name (text input), the selection of the person's sex (select box), and whether the sex should be shown publicly (checkbox). Here's what the output of the widget will look like: I know, it's not much, but you'll be able to take these tools and apply them to more complex widgets. Loading the widget at the appropriate