Jeff Chandler wrote a post a few days ago explaining his vision for the WordPress widget system. His post got me thinking so I want to take his vision one step further and look at some of the practical methods of achieving them.

For a wireframe widget system to truly work the wireframe needs to be set up by the theme author before hand. I envisage an area of WordPress.org where a theme author can upload a large screenshot of their theme, and using the tools provided, select the regions where the sidebars are placed. For example:

The theme in this example is Clockwork Simple

For each region they select they provide a nice name, and the name of the sidebar within the theme so that WordPress can match them up later on. Once finished they are given an XML file containing the screenshot filename, the coordinates of each region, and the names of each sidebar. The XML file and large screen shot are saved within the theme folder.

When the user installs the theme and navigates to the widgets page they are presented with the list of widgets, as now, but instead of clicking add, they drag the widget to the location they want. For example:

I think this process could really create a solid usable widget system, but I also think that more change is required to the process of creating a widget in the first place.

In the scenario described about, and which I wrote about in a previous post — changing layouts using widgets, many more places use widgets to provide options. For example, the main area could contain a single post widget, that is only used for single posts, a multiple post widget, for archives, and a page widget. These do away with the need for multiple template pages as each widget deals with one specific situation. The problem with this is that widgets are too hard to create.

Widgets are simple enough to create for a plugin author, but theme authors should be able to define a PHP file as a widget by adding some code at the top, in the same way as the CSS file contains the theme details.

If the want to create a single post layout with an image on the left they create it as a file and add the widget code. They can then do the same for a single post layout with the image on the right, a larger image with text below it, and so on, without needing to worry about the plugin style code that would be needed in functions.php right now.

In the next few days I will release a plugin that allows widgets to be created from theme files in this way so you can see for yourself how easy things could be. All we need now is the new font end. Roll on 2.8.