[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #34906: Create widget categories

[WordPress Trac]

#34906: Create widget categories
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 Reporter:  flixos90            |      Owner:
     Type:  feature request     |     Status:  new
 Priority:  normal              |  Milestone:  Awaiting Review
Component:  Widgets             |    Version:
 Severity:  normal              |   Keywords:
  Focuses:  ui, administration  |
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 Many users face the issue that they have a lot of widgets on their sites.

 Finding a specific widget can be a little too time-consuming in these
 cases and there is no way of grouping widgets - although they often serve
 completely different purposes.

 Furthermore, having a lot of widgets sometimes results in a bad workflow
 where, if the user wants to insert a widget which shows at the bottom of
 the screen into a widget area, he/she has to start dragging the widget,
 scroll all the way to the top of the page and paste the widget there since
 the widget area is placed somewhere at the top of the screen.

 I would propose a kind of category mechanism for the widgets. This could
 either...

 * work like a taxonomy where users can add new groups and assign their
 widgets to them or...
 * be handled by the plugin / theme adding the widget

 While the first idea is more flexible, it involves a little work on the
 user side when setting up a site, and I feel like it also might confuse
 some users. That's why I personally prefer the second approach. In the
 following, I will describe my thoughts about this approach (a code-managed
 grouping of widgets) in a more detailed way:

 We would need to think of a way that this could work. It could be...

 * source-based (automatic): where does the widget come from? either
 'WordPress', name of a plugin or name of a theme
 * component-based (manual): this could be a new 'component' setting
 defined in the widget class' `$widget_options`
 * more ideas?

 Here I would suggest using the second approach, however we would also need
 to think whether the plugin/theme author adding the widget could just add
 any component name he/she wants or (which I would prefer) whether the
 available component names should be limited: For example, it could be
 component names similar to those Component names used on Trac to
 categorize a ticket (of course not actually the same names, but a similar
 approach). Maybe there could be some default component names, but we could
 also add a function `register_widget_group()` which a developer could use
 to add an additional group.

 Opinions? Is that something worth thinking about? In my opinion it would
 greatly improve the widgets screen experience.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/34906>
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