[wp-hackers] Idea: Widgets as custom post types

[Austin Matzko]

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:
> Changing Links into Posts does not make sense to me. Changing Widgets
> does not make sense to me. These are fundamentally different things,
> used in different ways. They should be designed to be the most
> efficient for their use case, not made generic just for the sake of
> making them generic.

[snip]

> Widgets should be made more generic, yes. But most likely they should
> be given their *own* table. Why? Because it's difficult to imagine a
> solid case for representing a single widget as a whole post page as
> well. Also, widgets don't need tagging or categories. What they need
> is a way to define their contents and parameters and code in a sane
> manner, and then to be easily placed and moved around the page. In
> this sense, they can move beyond the sidebar and onto the rest of the
> structure.
>
> Lets just think before acting, that's all I'm saying.

I don't disagree with much of what you've said, but with WP
development I aim for:
 * An improvement
 * Something that has a chance of happening

Widgets as post types is significantly better than serialized data,
and widgets as their own table will never happen.