Creating an empty/blank text widget for WordPress without additional markup and divs

WordPress provides a simple text widget that you can use on your blog to add some random HTML, Ads, images, and so on. But I have one problem and that is that it’s always adding some extra HTML like this.

<div class="widget">
 <div class="textwidget">
 </div>
</div>

Sometimes you do not want this code if you for example want to add a widget to a ul and want the outer tag to be a li. I tried to Google for this but surprisingly I didn’t find a single “Super Empty Text Widget” so I created one myself.

/**
 * SuperEmptyWidget Class
 */
class SuperEmptyWidget extends WP_Widget {
    /** constructor */
    function SuperEmptyWidget() {
        parent::WP_Widget(false, $name = 'SuperEmptyWidget');
    }

    /** @see WP_Widget::widget */
    function widget($args, $instance) {
        extract( $args );
        $content = $instance['content'];
        echo $content;
    }

    /** @see WP_Widget::update */
    function update($new_instance, $old_instance) {
	$instance = $old_instance;
	$instance['content'] = $new_instance['content'];
        return $instance;
    }

    /** @see WP_Widget::form */
    function form($instance) {
        $content = esc_attr($instance['content']);
        ?>
         <p>
          <label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('content'); ?>"><?php _e('Content:'); ?></label>
		          </p>
          <textarea class="widefat" cols="20" rows="16" id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('content'); ?>" name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name('content'); ?>"><?php echo $content; ?></textarea>

        <?php
    }

} // class SuperEmptyWidget

// register SuperEmptyWidget widget
add_action('widgets_init', create_function('', 'return register_widget("SuperEmptyWidget");'));

Just add that to your functions.php and you should have a widget that does not add any crap either before or after the content.