It pretty much works as advertised. Like most WP plugins it’s easy to install and activate. To bring it up in your sidebar, you use the nifty template tag:

< ?php sidebarlogin(); ?>

Simple enough. Though it does have one quirk I’d like to point out. When you login with Sidebar Login, it has a pleasant “welcome” greeting, followed by your Username. Like so:

Kinda silly, huh? I think a better behavior for this would be to to use your “Display Name” so it’s a bit more personalized. So instead of in my case displaying “Admin,” it’ll display “Stevie,” which I have setup in the WP Dashboard:

All it takes is a little consultation with the WordPress Codex to produce this helpful document, Function Reference/get userdata to find the info we need.

In the code to the plugin, on or around Line 26 there you’ll find this:

echo $before_widget . $before_title . __("Welcome "). $user_info->user_login  .$after_title;

What we need to do is change $user_info->user_login to use $user_info->display_name. Here is the complete revised line:

echo $before_widget . $before_title . __("Welcome "). $user_info->display_name  .$after_title;

Enacting this change will now display your “Display Name” after you login. Problem solved:

The documentation for this plugin is not very complete so I did a Google search to see if others had this quandary. Much to my surprise I didn’t find anything so I thought I’d share what worked for me.

Thanks to the documentation at the WP Codex and reading through some PHP code, it was a quick solution. Take a look at the document at WP Codex to further experiment with your greeting.

Also thanks to Mike Jolley and his excellent Sidebar Login plugin!

Update 4/20/2009:
Sidebar Login has been updated so it now uses “Display Name” by default.