Hi Tom,
I’ve tested over hundred plugins and ended up with just 5 that really served. So what really matters talking about plugins, are 4 important cornerstones: 1. usability, 2. correct coding, no conflicts, 3. easy and quick styling and 4. active maintenance.
People rely on a good working plugin as they are often crucial to their websites. And than you are overloaded with “thank you” and… donations!!!
Looking to no.1 usability, we’re using a smartphone or a tablet and that means touching, touching and more touching. It has substituted the mouse click, the hover and the hover out. I hold my finger ready to touch a link, it keeps their to touch the same link and then that finger is directed to the following link. Easy, comfortable and fast. OK, if my finger is directed somewhere else on that little screen, it can close the panel by touching anywhere. Easy, comfortable and fast. Keep the touch!
In a modern menu bar you find buttons that opens a flyout menu or panel, just that and with a little arrow to indicate its working, and if no children exists, the button itself is a link to an URL. That’s useful and practical too.
About the widget’s behaviour I think the best way is what you suggested: to show the whole widget. Practical too: users can easily oversee what they’re doing and won’t forget to enter all fields. It is very frustrating to have things done twice ore more because of the unnecessary limitations of a plugin. Practical too should be adding an alert, down of the widget in the colorbox panel to the left or right side, showing a text like widget added as soon the user clicked the save button of the widget. Because right now nothing happens, no signs at all.
No, I’m not using a mac and that particular behaviour was not there before you did that famous JS cleaning! ??
Also very useful is an information tooltip to the right side of the “select a widget to display… field, telling about its use (the big tags, inserting more widgets). Because most of the downloads of your plugin are performed by users to be taken by the hand, few are developers!
Well, I hope my input and thoughts are helping you to sort things out. I’m sure this plugin will help many people in the next few weeks to enhance their websites with a smooth and shining menu bar!
Felix