Wordpress Widget Boilerplate

Here is a Wordpress snippet to create your own Wordpress Widgets. A Widget is a piece of PHP Code which will run when it is placed inside a Sidebar. A good example of a widget is data displayed in the sidebar of a blog. Like this blog I use widgets to display the Google badge, Twitter Feed and Facebook like box. Having these as Widgets mean I can place them in multiple places of the Wordpress theme directly in the Wordpress dashboard. You can create a Wordpress widget to do anything you want, the easiest way to create a Wordpress widget is to inherit the WP_Widget class. This way you can use the inbuilt functions to update the widget, display the widget and create an admin page for the widget. Below is the boilerplate of a Wordpress widget, when you create a new widget just copy and paste the below code as a starting point for your Widget.

/**
 * Adds Foo_Widget widget.
 */
class Foo_Widget extends WP_Widget {

	/**
	 * Register widget with WordPress.
	 */
	public function __construct() {
		parent::__construct(
	 		'foo_widget', // Base ID
			'Foo_Widget', // Name
			array( 'description' => __( 'A Foo Widget', 'text_domain' ), ) // Args
		);
	}

	/**
	 * Front-end display of widget.
	 *
	 * @see WP_Widget::widget()
	 *
	 * @param array $args     Widget arguments.
	 * @param array $instance Saved values from database.
	 */
	public function widget( $args, $instance ) {
		extract( $args );
		$title = apply_filters( 'widget_title', $instance['title'] );

		echo $before_widget;
		if ( ! empty( $title ) )
			echo $before_title . $title . $after_title;
		?>Hello, World!<?php
		echo $after_widget;
	}

	/**
	 * Sanitize widget form values as they are saved.
	 *
	 * @see WP_Widget::update()
	 *
	 * @param array $new_instance Values just sent to be saved.
	 * @param array $old_instance Previously saved values from database.
	 *
	 * @return array Updated safe values to be saved.
	 */
	public function update( $new_instance, $old_instance ) {
		$instance = array();
		$instance['title'] = strip_tags( $new_instance['title'] );

		return $instance;
	}

	/**
	 * Back-end widget form.
	 *
	 * @see WP_Widget::form()
	 *
	 * @param array $instance Previously saved values from database.
	 */
	public function form( $instance ) {
		if ( isset( $instance[ 'title' ] ) ) {
			$title = $instance[ 'title' ];
		}
		else {
			$title = __( 'New title', 'text_domain' );
		}
		?>
		<p>
		<label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id( 'title' ); ?>"><?php _e( 'Title:' ); ?></label> 
		<input class="widefat" id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id( 'title' ); ?>" name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name( 'title' ); ?>" type="text" value="<?php echo esc_attr( $title ); ?>" />
		</p>
		<?php 
	}

} // class Foo_Widget