Yesterday I upgraded Webquills.net to the "Boxing Day" build of MTOS. I was pleased to find that the widgetized sidebar is now activated for the default theme. I had tried (admittedly not very hard) to get the widgetized sidebar working in a previous build, but all I got was empty space.
Actually, with the Boxing Day release, you still get empty space by default, because although the widgetized sidebar is enabled, the sidebar components aren't actually populated with any widgets.
Creating your own widgets works pretty much like you would expect. I created a Google AdSense widget just by pasting the AdSense code into a new widget and wrapping it in a couple of nested divs classed with "widget" and "widget-content" respectively, code that I copied from the pre-built widgets. I was also able to modify some existing widgets without any trouble.
But I see that a new nightly build is out, so this is probably old news. Still, I'm gratified to see steady progress being made. The nightly builds are firming up. Some people have reported intermittently about upgrade issues, so you'll probably want to wait for the stable release to upgrade an older Movable Type installation. If you're starting up a new blog, the nightly builds should prove good enough at this point.
