Portal and Widgets

Something, I haven't put so much thought into, but has recently caught my attention is widgets and the portal; what should we have on it? I plan to recreate the staff I made on X, and should have widgets on the side of the fourm? If so shoudl we expand the forum? Please give opinions and so on.

Staff widget thats a good idea.
Get some links up there to like announcements and rules. That would work well.
Other than that it gets to be a bit cumbersome for the widgets. That just gets annoying. Links and staff keep it at that the rest is on the forum and the forum is the forum for a reason. Don't want to make it all about the portal. But there definitely and 100% should be a portal and don't get me wrong there are some things that should be in the widgets on this forum.

At least that is my opinion on the thing.