Luckily, the core team decided to address the issue, and thanks to the ticket #17979 (quite an active ticket by the way!), widgets now get saved between themes. But why not push that idea further, and change a bit the way widgets are organized today?

Widget sidebars as menus, the Ipstenu way

Mika demonstrated with a series of 3 posts that we could improve the current widget system by completely revisting it, and handle WP sidebars like we manage menus today.

I like the idea because people might view widgets differently. It also makes it easier to manage multiple sidebar areas, so more flexibility in themes in the future.

Besides, I was never a big found of the drag-and-drop thing: it works great, but it is a bit annoying to use when some widgets are expanded, or when you registered a lot of different sidebars. I used to combine sidebars and conditional tags to be able to have different sidebars on different pages, and that quickly becomes quite a mess. Sure, you have a title and a description for each widget area, but the widgets page quickly gets incredibly long.

By viewing each sidebar in a different tab, we would avoid such issues. And by viewing available widgets in a checkbox list, it allows you to quickly browse and find the widgets you are looking for.

register_sidebar elements as options

I would like to add one more option to this Widgets page. This option would not be displayed by default, you could activate it through the screen options, and once you did, you would have access to the different elements associated with that widget area:

• before_title
• after_title
• before_widget
• after_widget

One place to find them, One place to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

Today, if you are looking for new widgets, you look for it in the plugin repo: it is handy, there is a tag for it, and you can easily add them directly from your WordPress plugin page. But what if we push the concept a bit further? Mika proposed an area where all your available widgets would be listed. I think it would be great to have one more area, where you could search for available widgets in the plugin repo.

The problem is that many widgets are actually binded to a theme or a plugin, so you couldn’t list all widgets available for download there, but I think that would still be quite useful. Of course, that also means that some clean-up would have to be done in the repo. But Otto is working on that…

And you, what do you think about the widgets management today? Are you happy with it? Do you have any ideas to improve them?

For further reading and experiments

• WordPress Sidebars as Menus: Part 1
• WordPress Sidebars as Menus: Part 2
• WordPress Sidebars as Menus: Part 3
• Ticket #17979: Avoid losing widgets when switching themes

I have presented you a very complete tutorial about widgets a few weeks ago, but here are a few others to help you manage your widgets easily:

• Creating Widgets in WordPress 2.8 with the Widget API | WooCamp
  A tutorial from Woothemes team, to teach you how to create your own WordPress widgets.
• Kaspars Adds Widget Context To Plugin Repository
  Jeff speaks about two WordPress widget plugins, that can help you to specify where and when widgets are displayed within your WordPress theme. If you are looking for such a plugin, go have a look at Widget Logic and Widget context plugin, they cboth can be really useful!

Manage your newsletters

• Plugin: Create Newsletters with Customized Layout | WordPress Blogging | Blog Perfume
  Another simple but yet great newsletter plugin for WordPress.

News First!

• Yummthemes debacle and what we think – From The Couch | CSS Videos | Video Tutorials | Video Interviews
  Yesterday we saw quite a bit of activity on twitter about a new theme company, yummthemes, coming as a competitor to woothemes and Thesis among others.
  One theme has been introduced so far, osea, and it seems interesting even if we have no notions about the price or the conditions attached to that theme coming up in the middle of July.
  However the landing page announcing this new theme club seems a bit wrong to me, simply because it shows other WordPress theme developers as competitors when the WordPress community tries to avoid such approach by linking to each other and maintaining good relationship between themselves.
  Here is the opinion of the guys from the Couch! Make sure you check the comments as well as yummthemes’ owner has expressed his opinion about all this!

Then some nice tutorials:

• 10 incredibly cool WordPress shortcodes
  Introduced in WordPress 2.5, shortcodes are a very easy way to display lot of things on your blog posts by inserting a very simple code.
• Creating Dashboard Widgets in Two Easy Steps | WooCamp
  Creating Dashboard Widgets is an easy thing to do, and can add some professional finish to your theme! Check how to do on WooCamp!
• WordPress Theme Template & Directory Structure
  It’s time for another episode of the WordPress theme tutorial series by themeshaper.com. Today, we will speak about what has to be in your theme.

And a nice WordPress theme:

• ElegantThemes – ePhoto WordPress Theme
  ePhoto was created for those looking to turn their blog into a photo gallery