While working on a new website today, I found myself needing a widget that would show the archive list from one blog on another blog within my WordPressMU installation. Unfortunately, after a bit of Googling, I couldn’t find any that already existed. It was then that I decided to take matters into my own hands.
I started searching for tutorials on building WordPress widgets. I found some decent tutorials, and was able to put the widget together pretty quickly. However, I then realized that I needed to be able to use multiple instances of the widget, as I have more than one sidebar set up (one or the other is shown, depending on which page the visitor is viewing). Then, it was basically back to the drawing board.
After a bit more searching, I came across a nice tutorial explaining how to build a multiple-instance widget. I got that all put together, but found that things still didn’t work quite right because of the fact that I was running WordPressMU.
Finally, I started looking at another widget I had installed that was written specifically for WordPressMU. If you are planning to build some sort of widget for WordPressMU, I would highly recommend viewing the source for the Shared Blogroll widget plug-in, and using it, combined with the information in the tutorial linked above, to build your own widget.
Hopefully, once I test the new widget I created for a little while, I will release it publicly and openly so that you can use it, modify it and build off of it.