We’re doing something a little different this Theme Friday, instead of adding new themes (which we’ve done twice in the past week) we’ve added some functionality to the bulk of the themes on our service, updating dozens.

We’re very proud to introduce WordPress Widgets. Basically what we’ve done is broken down the sidebars in themes into discrete blocks of goodness, and created an interface for you to add, delete, and rearrange them by simply dragging and dropping. It’s as easy as falling off a blog.

The widgets are basic right now, things like search, categories, pages, etc, but we’re going to be adding more based on your requests and we’re opening up an API for anyone to create their own widgets. (It’s as writing a single function and wrapping it in a WordPress plugin.)

What we integrate at this point is going to be entirely driven by you, so be sure to use the feedback link to let us know what you want. You’re free to also blog about what you want or start a thread in the forums, but right now it’s easiest for us to tabulate things sent in via the feedback form in the top-right of your admin section.

In the meantime, if you see a “Sidebar Editor” menu item under the Presentation tab, that means your active theme has sidebar options. (It’s not live for every theme, so try a few different ones out.) Play around with making your blog a little more personal, and rest assured we have more on the way. 🙂

As a final note, this functionality was very much inspired by the updated Hemingway we included a few days ago, so props to Kyle Neath on a great idea and good initial implementation. (Not to mention how awesome Hemingway is.) Our very own Andy came up with the widget framework and adapted most of the current themes.