How to take advantage of text boxes in widgetized areas

The text in this widget is intended to appear in the widgetized section “Sidebar 1″ in the Frugal Theme. (That is, the left sidebar,  – or to be more confusing, the column immediately to the right of the main column. By composing this text in the “Add New Post” window(s), one can insert exercise some of the control we take for granted in composing a post. Inserting a bulleted or numbered will show up as a line-break separated list, slthough without the “bullets” (the dingbats, or raised characters, which are the bullets in a bulleted list) or numbers.

• add a list, as noted above
• insert a link e.g. Frugal Theme.
• use common text styling: e.g bold, strikethrough, colored text, italic or a combination of several at the same time.

Use heading styles, e.g.

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

How do you use those options in a widget?

The WordPress editing functions don’t appear when entering text in a text widget. But most of what you can do in the “new post”/”edit post” area, or using an html editor).NB: save this document early and often, of course, so you don’t suffer the irritations that go with losing work. But save it as a draft – otherwise you’ll end up publishing the same work twice – as a post and again in the sidebar).

Using the “new post” window to compose the post – one then simply

• Makes changes as desired;
• navigate to the “html” tab (“next to “visual” in WP editing window)
• select and copy the post text (i.e. the code, including the text)
• paste it into a “text” widget (remember, there’s no practical limits on the number of text widgets; each time one is created and saved, WordPress makes another “text” widget available).

I’m sure this doesn’t exhaust styling options in widgetized areas; and while sophisticated users may have ways of exercising more control, the tactics described here are a fairly direct way of managing simple styling in a text widget.