I have really loved using WordPress to power BlastMagazine.com, but I have been having two huge problems lately.

First, we do not use WordPress Widgets. We use WAY too many plugins and have about 15 different variations of a sidebar on Blast, so we aren’t using Widgets. But it seems like everyone is converting the best plugins to “Widget only” — that sucks for us and I get the feeling there’s a lot of actual bloggers out there that havne’t assimilated to the Widget world yet. 

My question: How do you manually insert/activate/use a Widget in a sidebar or a page without activating the dynamic/widget sidebar function? 

Number two: Importing text for dummies.

Blast has about 20 different people who insert articles or blog on the site. Many of them are not web savvy. But the two most common ways writers send us stories is by email (Gmail usually) and in Microsoft Word .doc (or that stupid .docx) format. 

The problem that leaves us with is that Gmail takes pasted text and inserts random linebreaks all over the place and Microsoft Word inserts all kinds of crazy crap, code, fonts, sizes, etc, etc, etc. I’ve training my editors on how to use the “Paste from Word” function, but even that’s not filtering out all of the MS Word garbage now.

Oh, and we could really use a good multi-author plugin that integrates to the post editor and lets us assign multiple authors to a single post…