This group will be focused on improving the process of adding and editing widgets in the WordPress admin. There's a few problems with the way things work now, including:
- Widgets, sidebars, and their connection to themes is pretty confusing. There's no connection between the sidebar in wp-admin, and the area in your theme.
- The current focus of the page is on available widgets. Sidebars only take up a small portion of the page.
- Having more then 2 or 3 sidebars makes it terrible hard to drag-and-drop widgets around the screen.
- Its not at all obvious how you install a new widget.
- Its not possible (without code) to display widgets, or groups of widgets, based on certain conditions like, "only show on home" or, "don't show on single".
http://www.shaunandrews.com/wordpress-widgets-initial-thoughts/ http://webdevstudios.com/2013/08/14/webdevstudios-take-on-a-wordpress-core-widget-ui-refresh/ http://www.shaunandrews.com/wordpress-widgets-initial-thoughts/widgets-tabbed-ui-concept/ http://www.shaunandrews.com/design-2/prototype-w/
Not decided yet, but likely a mix of IRC (#wordpress-ui), and p2 (make/ui), with a pinch of Skype tossed in for flavor.
- shaunandrews
- jtsternberg
- RichardTape has expressed interest
@peterchester I like this idea, and also meet a lot of WordPress users who find the disconnect between the abstract widget backend and the presentation on the front too fiddly.
I'd be interested in helping with a visual frontend editor for widgets. Since an edit-in-place approach is unlikely to work for most widgets, because many have complex settings, I propose a "flip to edit" approach:
http://css3playground.com/flip-card.php
Logged-in users with certain privileges would be able to flip widgets to edit them – the reverse side would contain all the settings for that widget. Potentially, widgets could be added and reordered from the front end, and this could be made to work on mobile too. Is that worth exploring? Should this be a separate plugin from the backend widget rethink?