[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #19912: Add Widget Groups and Locations

[WordPress Trac]

#19912: Add Widget Groups and Locations
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 Reporter:  koopersmith      |       Owner:
     Type:  feature request  |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:  3.4
Component:  General          |     Version:  3.3.1
 Severity:  normal           |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                   |
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Comment (by azaozz):

 There are some very big differences between the menus and widgets config
 screens. The biggest one is that menus are configured one by one and
 widgets are configured all at the same time. Another big difference (UI
 vise) is that menus can be added from only 3 places that take up a small
 portion of the screen, however there are usually 30-40 "available widgets"
 that take up most of the screen.

 The general UX concept is quite different too: menus are treated as the
 separate entities versus sidebars are treated as containers where the
 entities (widgets) are "stored". Imagine the menus screen having 4-5 menus
 displayed at the same time and being able to drag and drop submenus
 between them.

 Imho adding even more components to the already busy widgets config screen
 would make it a lot harder to use. It is a nice idea to keep widgets
 grouped somehow but the UI/UX challenges in displaying and working with
 these groups would make that a step backwards. It seems the only way this
 could be implemented would be to mimic the way menus screen works at the
 moment, i.e. multi-step. However that would revert the widgets screen
 workflow to pre-2.7 state (remember how each sidebar had to be selected
 from a drop-down at the top-right and how many users didn't even know
 their theme had several sidebars?).

 In any case having "widgets groups" in addition to having sidebars (that
 are also widgets groups) makes sense only when switching themes. Thinking
 that instead of making the widgets screen and the process of setting
 widgets more complicated, all of the concerns in this ticket can be
 resolved by displaying a preview of the front-end while setting the
 widgets (hopefully in 3.5). Then we can afford to "guess" the position of
 visible widgets when switching themes and the user will be able to correct
 the positions of any widgets we didn't guess right.

 Replying to [comment:5 Nobble]:
 > - a better visual ui for widgets. Right now the widget admin screen
 lists areas vertically and if a theme has a lot of areas it becomes hard
 to manage. It's also less intuitive than seeing the page visually
 represented in sections that reflect the actual page layout. If locations
 can be defined the visual ui for widget management could be improved at
 some point to.

 Currently the widgets config screen is roughly separated into two columns:
 unused widgets on the left and widgets that are in use on the right.
 Loosing that logical separation would make the UI a lot messier and harder
 to use.

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Ticket URL: <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/19912#comment:6>
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