[Plugin: Tabbed Widgets] Not showing up correct widgets, and suggestion: Create a sidebar for tabs

  • When attempting to create a tab, the list of available widgets is incomplete, and incorrect – it doesn’t show some of the widgets that are currently active, it shows some widgets that aren’t active at all, and there are some widgets that aren’t shown whatsoever.

    Widgets that are shown that shouldn’t be: YARPP, Pages: Pages, Calendar:, Archives: Archives, Links, Meta: Meta, Recent Comments: Recent Comments, NextGEN Slideshow

    Widgets that aren’t shown that should be: Twitter #1: Twitter updates, Most Visited Posts: Popular Posts.

    Additionally, the mechanism used – taking active widgets and showing them in a drop-down per tab – seems a little hack-ish. How about doing away with the “Tabbed Widgets” page under “Design” entirely, and instead, using the existing mechanisms, i.e:

    1. Like the NextGEN gallery and Twitter plugins, have a form at the bottom of the ‘Widgets’ page:
    How many Tabbed widgets would you like? […] [Save]
    This registers the specified number of widgets for use.

    2. Provide per-Tabbed widget options the same way that normal widget options are offered – straight from the Widgets page. One configuration option: Number of tabs

    3. For every tab, for every active Tabbed widget (every one added to a sidebar), register a new ‘sidebar’, that one can select using the dropdown at the top-right of the ‘Widgets’ page. E.g:

    – User adds a tabbed widget
    – For the widget configuration, number of tabs is set to 2, and title is set to ‘Posts’ (title can be hidden, but title must be provided)
    – Two sidebars are registered: “Posts Tab 1”, and “Posts Tab 2”
    – Using the ‘Sidebar’ selection drop down at the top of the widgets page, user selects ‘Posts Tab 1’
    – User adds, say, ‘Recent posts’ widget to the ‘Posts Tab 1’ sidebar
    – User selects ‘Posts Tab 2’ sidebar
    – User adds, for example, ‘Popular Posts’ widget to ‘Posts Tab 2’

    This way, the user can have as many widgets as they like inside a tab, and it keeps the whole configuration simple, extensible and relatively compliant.

    I might have a go at this some time…

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  • Thank you for the suggestions.

    The drop-down list shows not only the active widgets, but also those that don’t require any configuration (which don’t have controls under Widget management).

    The logic you describe is already implemented in Fun with Sidebar Tabs plugin.

    Moving tabbed widget to Widgets section and making them as regular widgets sounds reasonable, although I think there was a particular reason why I chose not do it in the first place.

    Oh, I remembered the reason why the Tabbed Widget management was moved to a separate section — most of the widgets don’t allow creating multiple instances of them, although WordPress (> 2.5) does support such functionality (which is used for text, rss and other core widgets).

    So I wanted to be able to reuse one widget (with the same content) into multiple tabbed widgets (one shown as regular tabs, one as an accordion).

    The drop-down list shows not only the active widgets, but also those that don’t require any configuration (which don’t have controls under Widget management).

    Is there a solution to this problem? I wanted to use this plugin to make my FireStats and MiniMeta widgets tabbed, but I don’t see any way to make the MiniMeta widget work with Tabbed Widgets, presumably because it requires configuration. If I can’t use this with any widgets that have configuration options, it’s not very useful. ??

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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