Monster Widget: A Useful WordPress Theme Testing Tool

Activating and deactivating widgets can become quite tedious when testing WordPress themes. Monster Widget is a handy plugin, created by the folks at Automattic. It adds all of the default WordPress widgets to a “monster” widget that you can deploy as one collective instance.

Monster Widget

Once the widget is added to your sidebar, you’ll see all of the following standard core widgets on the frontend:

Archives List and Dropdown

Calendar

Categories List and Drowpdown

Pages

Meta

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

RSS

Search

Text (with images and text)

Tag Cloud

Nav Menu

Blogroll

If you’re creating a WordPress theme for public distribution or for a client, the Monster Widget will give you an instant picture of how different kinds of widgets will display in your theme.

Once you’re done testing, you can easily remove all of the widgets in one click. The plugin was not created for production use but can save you quite a bit of time (at least a couple dozen clicks) during theme development and testing. Download the Monster Widget plugin from WordPress.org.