Many, many people use widgets to control content in general rather than just their sidebar.

For example, can you imagine an entirely widgetized theme? You could control the layout of the theme, what order post details are shown in, etc.

The admin page also need to be redesigned to better handle more widget… panes? as well as widgets themselves.

Most people who use the text widgets want to use them for ads and such. If I style the h2 tags in themes to do fun visual stuff, and we use the stock widget plugin and don’t want a headline for a specific ad block, what happens is the h2 tag shows up empty and the styling shows up also, even though we didn’t want it there. Not good. So it would be great if there was an option for each text widget to turn the h2 off. It would also be great to have this same option on Pages widget block.

There’s also a gotcha with text widgets in another way. If you populate a text widget then decide you need more text widgets, and go into admin and create them you currently LOSE the data in the ones you already created. Not good. I haven’t tried this with the rss widgets to see if there is the same problem, since I don’t use those as extensively. A way to back up or save that data or at the very least a warning in admin that people should back up the db before making changes there would lessen some headbanging.

Some of my layouts require, for instance, a horizontal nav up top with Pages. It would be nice for a developer to be able to remove the Pages widget from the lineup if that one is already hardwired in. Ditto Search.

Categories– we would LOVE to see more flexibility in the tagging there! And possibly more than one category widget, so they can be split between different areas. Same goes for the links and link categories.

Basically, the tradeoff I’m always fighting between using widgets and not using widgets is that I can’t use custom template tags that specify, for instance, a certain sort order, no headline, and excluding a category or page, but in exchange for that lack of flexibility, I give flexibility to the client in other ways. If you could figure out a way to give us devs some of that custom tag functionality back, that would be great.

Infact we started using it on the blogs at NYTimes.com blogs. However we did have to make quite a few modifications to it. The current configuration only allows for one possible sidebar, we have 3 different sidebar views. It would be good to allow for multiple sidebars.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function is_active_module() in /opt/lampp/htdocs/wordpress/wp-content/themes/k2/theloop.php on line 76

Looks like the K2 guys forgot a lil bit of code there

We have an idea for functionality to add to WPress — but Im wondering…should it be a widget? or should it be a plug-in. Can you tell us the benefits or either or limiations of either when preparing to develop something?