Drag and Drop: why is it gone?

It still exists in the widget page to arrange the order of the widgets, just not for passing them from active to inactive.

I suspect it was to simplify the administration panel to allow for new users to quickly adjust and understand how to use it. I know even as an old school programmer that at first glance I didn’t quite understand how all of what WordPress could do actually fit together.

Keeping a simple stock template also allows for others to modify the panels to their own liking later on…

But the drag and drop functionality allowed for customization of the write panels. Don’t you think that would be MORE beneficial for beginners?

I just don’t understand REDUCING FUNCTIONALITY for sake of simplicity. Especially when we’re talking about drag and drop, how simpler can it get?

Personally I prefer the new widgets management. The old one had always seemed kind of clunky and non-intuitive.

All the functionality is there isn’t it? From what I can tell at least.

I’ve gotten a little more used to it – my new theme is going to have 6 custom sidebars and it would be nice to have them all on one page.

But other than the loss of that, I really, really like the new version and upgraded my site to 2.5 with RC1 as soon as it was released and am now running RC2. I can hardly wait for an “official” release, I’ll upgrade all my sites…

Now, if the author of WP-Widget-Changer would update his plugin, my life would be complete! ??

Widgets are alright, I suppose. But when you have a lot of them the page stretched down FARRRR.

And I’m mostly critiquing the write page. That sidebar is just SO BLANK. I wish we had at least tags and categories over there. And I wish we could drag and drop the panels again.

I think that dragging and dropping is a fad, that WordPress used when it was popular, and is moving away from now that it is not.

This is like when Flash first came out, EVERYONE had a flash website with an intro screen. The fact is that the common user doesn’t ever think of clicking on something on a website and dragging it without being instructed to do so. The internet is so 2 dimensional that the idea of interfacing with it on an interactive touch-and-feel level is still a very immature one; one that in my old-school opinion I personally feel is unnecessary since the same can be accomplished with the mouse totally unplugged. ??

I wish that the widgets were smart or conditional; so that I could set equations and circumstances that must be met to show or not show specific widgets on certain pages. This would work similar to how the original sidebar.php file works, but within the admin panel rather than have me modify the file directly.

The idea behind a WordPress widget is to categorize commonly used functions of a website (calendar, search, links, pages, etc…) and provide a unified toolset packaged within WordPress to offer these functionalities without touching the code, which I think is great, but it starts to cross the line of dumbing it down just a tad too much…

What makes WordPress great is the ease at which the code can be modified to fit individual needs, and the widgets lose that ability if they are hard-coded into the interface itself.

/end opinion

…and back on topic; don’t expect for dragging and dropping to come back anytime soon. It was very much a sign of the times, using technology for the wrong purpose, similar to much of how AJAX is still used everywhere. ??

the write page desperately needs to be able to be more customizable. it doesn’t even have to be drag and drop — they have to use the space more wisely as there’s too much white space above the fold.

the widgets just got a lot more complicated. i would prefer if they gave us different ways of “viewing” it just like an OS would.