This has been languishing in my development folder for a while now. Rather than wait till I have time time to finish the last 10%, here is tw-asides v0.9 version 1.0.

tw-asides is an asides widget for WordPress. It lets you publish short posts that appear in your sidebar rather than in the main content column.

Some themes offer a similar feature already, but this one should work with any theme that supports widgets.

To use it, in brief:

1. Install and activate the plugin.

2. On the Design / Widgets tab of your dashboard, add the Asides widget to a sidebar. Remember to click the Save button.

4. Write a short post, and add the tag ‘Asides’. Publish it: it will appear in your sidebar instead of at the top of your front page.

If you’d prefer to use a different tag to identify your asides, you can change it in the widget options.

That’s about all there is to it. Asides posts won’t appear in your main content stream, whether it’s on the front page of your blog or when navigating via the next/previous post links. (If you visit the permalink page for an Asides post, next and previous will navigate amongst other Asides). The Asides tag archive page will work normally.

Download it here:

tw-asides.php 1.0

Update – I’ve added a plugin textdomain as per Robert’s suggestion, and bumped the version to 1.0. Also changed since 0.9, the permalink and <br /> tag are omitted if the post title is empty; this offers an easy way to write asides without permalinks for those who are so inclined.