I’ve been working with WordPress for quite a while now, on and off. I started modifying it after discovering the Squible theme and subsequently became one of its developers. I’ve used it in a number of places for a number of sites over the ensuing years, and along the way have developed a few plugins of my own for it, mostly for my own use.
Recently I came across a post in the WordPress support forums referencing the Flickr Thumbnails widget I wrote for Squible a long time ago which prompted me to go back and have a look at the whole widget/plugin system as it exists now as compared to back when I was developing Squible. WordPress 2.8 brought in a much cleaner widget API and over the last couple of days I’ve converted the Flickr Thumbnails widget over to the new system. The new version won’t inherit the settings from any previous version of the widget you have installed, but it does allow for new functionality like columns (thanks to debashish, who posted the thread in the support forums that restarted all this) and multiple instances, so if you wanted to you could have more than one Flickr Thumbnails widget in your sidebar with different settings for each one.
I’ve also added a quick and dirty widget I wrote for my own use that allows you to include a file within a widget. It’s still very rough but does what I want it to for now, and if you’re keen and daring you can try it out.
The Flickr Thumbnails widget has been added to the WordPress plugin repository also, which is really quite clever with all its automation. Include widget is awaiting activation on the repository before it too will be added.