You should use either use the WordPress built-in plugin installation process, or download the zip file of the plugin, unzip it, and copy it into your wp-content/plugins folder.

Sign in to the back-end of your WordPress administration (usually your site’s main address plus /wp-admin ) and navigate to Appearance | Plugins | Installed.

In the main part of the Manage Plugins page, you should now see the Spectacu.la Page Widget in grey. Click on the activate text to activate the widget. Once activated the line for the plugin will change to white.

We’re going to add a box to the top right of our WordPress site, showing the About page with an image.

Navigate to Appearance | Widgets. In this panel you can control the widgets displayed on your site. You may need to add the Search, Pages, Archives and Categories widgets if you’re on a new install of WordPress. In this example they are already set up.

Drag the Spectacu.la Page Widget across as shown above. Be aware that it may be in a different position to that shown above.

This is a powerful widget with a lot of options:

1. The page to show in the widget
2. Whether or not to show the title of the page
3. You can link to the source page - especially useful if you’re using the excerpt functionality
4. You can override the title and set something of your own
5. You can use an excerpt instead of the full content. The excerpt will be auto-generated unless you use Westi’s PJW Page Excerpt plugin which will allow you to create your own excerpt should you wish.
6. You may wish to hide this page from your site’s normal navigation. This may not work with some themes and plugins which don’t use conventional approaches to listing pages.

Set the options as in the image above, then click save.

Now let’s take a look at what’s happened.

As you can see, the sidebar now contains the entire content of the page, and the page has been removed from the navigation. Edit the post, and add a thumbnail aligned to the right…

As you can see, there isn’t much space for even a thumbnail in this theme’s sidebar, but don’t let that put you off, you can change the size easily in WordPress, although that’s a different lesson. Have you seen our WordPress User Guides?

And there he is - all right-sized and everything. Advanced WordPress users and designers will be able to make considerable use of this plugin, and basic users should be able to easily create well formatted and attractive sidebar content. If you have feedback on this plugin, feel free to comment here. If you need support, or simply wish to encourage us to release more plugins then you’ll need to join the (very reasonably priced) club.