I’ve been working on a little WordPress project these last few weeks with a colleague. When I first heard the idea, I thought, “That should be easy enough to build.” I decided the best way to tackle the feature would be a custom widget, but when I finally sat down to get it working I quickly began to realize that there were a few obstacles to overcome.

The project was really meant to extend an existing widget, and it seemed confusing to have both the default and extended version there side by side (plus it would be really nice to call them the same thing for transparency). I needed to get rid of it. You can’t just overwrite an existing widget by registering a new one by the same name - WordPress ignores it. And if I did manage to find a way to remove a default widget, when do you have to do it?

It’s been almost six months since my last post, and I just want to give everyone a heads up that I will be back very soon. The last six months have been quite exciting — graduation, a great new job, and a new apartment in Orchard Park, New York. Things have finally started settling down and I plan to get back to blogging in the next week or so. Wordpress’ Page Link Manager has a lot of new features coming which I think will be great additions, and I’ve been working on learning a bit of Ruby on Rails and jQuery, so I’m looking forward to sharing some of what I’ve learned with you.

In the meantime, check out my sisters new blog, rdmey. She posts great stuff nearly everyday about design, CSS and JavaScript, so it’s probably right up your alley.