Justin Tadlock has just posted his view on the new WordPress 2.5 widgets panel. And I have to agree fully with him. Here are some excerpts that I agree most with:

I want you to imagine being able to widgetize anything easily. Now, imagine 50 different widget blocks in the old widget admin panel. Could get messy, right? The new widgets section gives you a drop-down list of your widgetized areas, which sets no limits on how you use your blog.

The statement I set in bold shows the extra usability of the feature in action. Now, you might be wondering, sure, it works for 50 different widget blocks, but what about myself with only two sidebars?

The focus on this change is for you to concentrate on one sidebar at a time. It may prove troublesome and inconvenient when you first upgrade (sorry WordPress.com users!), but trust me, it will grow on you soon enough. I, for one, got used to it (and the rest of the interface) pretty quickly.

You’ll notice that you can’t even see the draggable widgets for the 2.3 install because they’re so far down the page you can’t reach them, making it nearly impossible to actually use the sidebars.

That’s another plus. If you look at the 2.5 screenshot, you will notice that the widgets are all nicely shifted to the left.

There’s even a dropdown above that allows you to display used, unused or all widgets. Being able to point out at a glance which you’ve used and which not, you can design your sidebars much more efficiently. But I think this only helps for themes that use the same sidebars (or footer widget areas) on every template. But that means a large portion of us, right? Right.

The only thing I had hoped for when seeing the new widget interface was that the show widgets and show sidebar dropdown menus would be Ajaxified. Otherwise, the new interface is pretty cool and much more usable. That’s my opinion.

Back to top