[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #27404: Widget Customizer: Allow adding inactive widgets to widget areas

[WordPress Trac]

#27404: Widget Customizer: Allow adding inactive widgets to widget areas
-------------------------------------------------+-------------------------
 Reporter:  westonruter                          |       Owner:
     Type:  feature request                      |  westonruter
 Priority:  normal                               |      Status:  accepted
Component:  Widgets                              |   Milestone:  4.8
 Severity:  normal                               |     Version:  3.9
 Keywords:  ux-feedback has-patch has-           |  Resolution:
  screenshots                                    |     Focuses:  ui,
                                                 |  javascript
-------------------------------------------------+-------------------------

Comment (by westonruter):

 I'm going to suggest that widgets most commonly get moved to inactive
 widget area as the result of a theme switch (#39693). It would be very
 useful if widgets that were made inactive as part of a theme switch could
 be grouped in a way to easily batch-add them to a sidebar in the new
 theme. By grouping them I don't mean widget persistent groups (#19912),
 but rather transient groupings that essentially are pulling the grouping
 of widgets from another theme's widget-sidebar assignments. Being able to
 easily and intuitively re-assign widgets from the previous theme's
 sidebars to the new theme's sidebars, maintaining their ordering, would be
 a huge.

 If the old theme has 3 sidebars whereas the new theme as 2 sidebars, note
 that this could mean that 2 groupings of inactive widgets could be added
 to one sidebar on the new theme. Two additional questions then come to
 mind: should the best-guess re-assignment of widgets from the old
 sidebar's theme to a sidebar in the new theme be eliminated unless the
 sidebar IDs are exact matches (e.g. `sidebar-1`)? If not, then it is
 likely that a re-assignment of widgets in the new theme will be wrong and
 need to be re-assigned. In that case, there should have to be a way to
 bulk move all widgets from one sidebar to another.

 It may be that this theme-switch grouping is out of scope for this ticket
 and should instead be addressed as part of #39693.

 /cc @melchoyce

--
Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/27404#comment:52>
WordPress Trac <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/>
WordPress publishing platform