The NMP Network

Earlier this evening, I had a great conversation with the one and only Ptah Dunbar. During my conversation, I had Ptah explain to me why child themes are good to use and why I as an end user need to care. While I’m still somewhat confused about the subject in general, he did a good job providing me with a few reasons. But that is not what I want to talk about in this post.

Instead, I want to mention an idea that I discussed with Ptah which at some later date, he may make a reality. In WordPress 2.5 up to 2.7, managing widgets is a real pain in the rear. I know Jane Wells has been quoted in saying that WordPress 2.8 will feature a reworked administration area for widgets but before that happens, here is my idea on how to manage widgets.

When I login to WordPress and browse into the themes/widgets area, at the center of the screen, I want to see a wireframe of the theme I am using on my blog. This wireframe can be incredibly simple highlighting the header, navigation column, widget sidebars, footer, content area, ect. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just enough to provide an at a glance view with regards to where widgets can be displayed. These widgetized sidebars should be differentiated from the rest of the theme within the wireframe.

In WordPress 2.3, the widgets which were installed were able to be dragged from the bottom of the site into the sidebar of choice. However, the weakness of managing widgets in this way comes to the surface when you have a theme that has 5-9 sidebars. Shifter was a prime example of this weakness as I usually had to scroll from the bottom of the page to the top most times to place a widget into one of the first sidebars.

Although that was a weakness, dragging widgets from one container to the sidebar was an intuitive way to manage where they were displayed. In WordPress 2.5, the weakness in the previous attempt was solved by adding two columns. One column contained the widgets that could be added to the sidebar while the other column was reserved for the actual display order. Ultimately what I would like to see is a combination of the two.

Widget Management In WP2.7

I want the ability to drag widgets from a repository into the widgetized areas located within the wireframe of my theme. This would enable me to know without looking how and where the widgets would be displayed on the site. I could then drag widgets up and down to change their display order within the wireframe as well. No need for a drop down box to select which sidebar you want to place widgets in because the wireframe would show the labels for each sidebar. That however, would be dependent on theme authors actually giving the sidebars good, descriptive titles.

In fact, much of what I described above would have to be adopted by theme authors for this to truly work. I’ve given Ptah the ideas and have described how I would want to it work and he has agreed to at least look into creating something similar.

Alister Cameron at WordCamp Australia described in his keynote something I’ve been harping on since the days I started using WordPress. That is, theme authors are not using the power of widgets to the best of their ability. Of course, having widgetized areas labeled as sidebars is part of the problem. I believe one of the ways in which to see themes evolve is to get rid of the term sidebar and quit relegating widgets to be displayed in a column located on the left or right hand side of the blog. If widget areas within a theme are to extend beyond the sidebar, the term has to be replaced by something a little more open. What that generic term is, I don’t know. Container, module, placeholder, are just a few. It sounds really dumb to have a theme that enables users to place widgets in the footer but technically, it is called a sidebar.

What does all of this mean? Well, I think this way of managing widgets would be intuitive, visual, and easy to explain to people. Applying widgets to a theme would be a simple matter of dragging them to the appropriate area of the wireframe which has widget support. No more columns, no more drop down menus. Drag and drop baby! while some of this relies on the framework of the WordPress backend, theme authors will have to step up their game if they want to take advantage of the new way of doing things. Theme authors will need to speak up in order to have this sidebar nonsense changed. I’m not sure if the theme wireframe would need to be taken care of by the theme author or if WordPress could handle that but considering the wireframe would be unique to each theme, I imagine the theme author would end up with the responsibility.

Well, I’ve expelled the idea from my head long enough so I’ll wrap up this post by asking for your feedback regarding the idea. Let me know the difficulties or negative side effects you can think of if this idea became a reality. What sort of things have I overlooked?

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