I'm not a fan of widgets. Instead, I prefer hardcoding everything. However I realize many people love them as they make customization as easy as clicking a button. But as is with everything else things can and do go wrong.
How many times have you loaded up with widgets then change themes only to find some of them stuck or even inaccessible? This means reverting back to the previous theme, clearing the widgets, switching themes and re-adding the widgets. Not a very convenient process in my book. Fortunately there is an alternative.
Justin Tadlock, the creator of many wonderful WordPress themes and plugins, wrote a nifty little plugin called Widgets Reset. It does exactly what the name implies. Once activated it will reset your widgets to the default settings. In other words it wipes the slate clean. This means you no longer have to revert to a previous theme and clear your widgets one by one which makes it a huge time saver in my opinion.
A word of caution is in order. When Justin says this plugin will reset the widgets to their default settings he means it. If you have any important information contained within a text widget for example you might want to save it prior to deploying the plugin.
You can download Widgets Reset from the official WordPress Plugin Directory. More information available from the official release page at Justin's blog.
About Len Kutchma
