I’ve recently been doing some work with some plugins from the guys and girls over at WPMU DEV. The most recent one has been using their plugin that adds Classified Ads to WordPress. I caught the plugin just as it underwent a major upgrade from an “old-style” plugin that used custom tables to a newer version that used custom taxonomies, and custom post types.

On balance, this is a huge improvement, however a coupe of features that were in the previous version, and that I want to use on my current project went AWOL. Fortunately, because the plugin now uses standard WordPress functionality for storing its data – these are pretty easy to knock together. So – my first major need was for a widget to show “recent ads” in a sidebar. Here’s a screenshot of the widget in action:

If you want to give it a try out – you can grab it here – just install it as a standard WordPress plugin, activate it, and the widget will be available under Appearance > Widgets in your WordPress admin area.