hackadelic

When you use a shortcode in a text widget to dynamically create its content, the shortcode may yield empty content in some contexts, leaving you with an ugly looking empty widget in your sidebar with nothing more than a title and a blank rectange.
What you want is a text widget that will only show up when it does have content. This is such a widget.
A use case when you will immediately benefit from <a href="http://hackadelic.com/solutions/wordpress/discreet-text-widget" title="Discreet Text Widget" rel="nofollow ugc">Discreet Text Widget</a> is when you want a <a href="http://hackadelic.com/solutions/wordpress/toc-boxes" title="Hackadelic SEO Table Of Contents" rel="nofollow ugc">Table of Contents</a> <a href="http://hackadelic.com/table-of-contents-in-the-sidebar" title="How To Add a Table Of Contents to the Sidebar" rel="nofollow ugc">in the sidebar</a>.
Check out the <a href="http://hackadelic.com/solutions/wordpress/discreet-text-widget" title="Discreet Text Widget" rel="nofollow ugc">plug-in homepage</a> for in-depth information about the plug-in.
<h3>License</h3>
This file is part of the Hackadelic Discreet Text Widget WordPress plugin.
Hackadelic Discreet Text Widget is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the <a href="http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html" rel="nofollow ugc">GNU Affero General Public License</a> as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Hackadelic Discreet Text Widget is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with Hackadelic Discreet Text Widget. If not, see <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/" rel="nofollow ugc">http://www.gnu.org/licenses/</a>.

Hackadelic Discreet Text Widget

A smarter text widget that can be used to display table of contents in the sidebar.

pantsonhead

RandomText is a handy WordPress plugin that allows you to save, edit and delete categorized text, and inject random/rotated text by category into the sidebar (via widget) or page body (via template tags). The sidebar widget allows you to set an optional Title, and text header and footer. You could say RandomText picks up where the Text widget left off. Whether you want to display random/rotated trivia, quotes, helpful hints, featured articles, or snippets of html, you can do it all easily with RandomText.

Random Text

Store and display random/rotated text by category in sidebar widget or templates.

Hackadelic Discreet Text Widget vs Random Text