Undo change to main widgets screen?

Thanks for the feedback on this.

I do agree that changing default screens should be done with extreme caution, and I tested this new design with many plugins in order to make sure that it wouldn’t break anything. The reason for the change is that I’ve seen plenty of sites with a big number of sidebars and widgets, which IMO made the screen almost unusable.

With that being said, I did want to make an option to disable it in Screen Options tab, but I did not find any API to add checkboxes. So I am still figuring out how this should be done.

If you click on the arrow in the red circle on your screenshots, you will be able to see the Inactive Widgets and Inactive Sidebars section where you can store your widgets. In the old design, moving a widget directly over to the available widgets would remove it, just like it does now, I haven’t changed that behaviour. The only thing changed is that the Inactive Widgets is hidden by default.

So to answer your question, currently there isn’t a way to remove the design unless you alter the CSS in content-aware-sidebars/css/style.css (you need to beautify it and then look for .js.branch-4-7.widgets-php)

Instead of removing it entirely though, I’d like to know if there’s anything I can do to make it work for you?

• This reply was modified 7 years, 7 months ago by Joachim Jensen.

Hi Joachim,
I see why you choose this solution… which is why I remove all unused widget in the sites I build for my clients.
Now you use the whole height for the available widgets, is they any way to take the height minus x pixels – in which you could show the inactive widgets (or just the header?)
Or divide the height 50/50 and choose which to ‘open’ with the down-arrow?
As you see in the screenshot your solution takes up space that it does not need – there is white-space at the end…

Now I know the deactivated exist, so I look for it – less experienced users will not know.

If I think/hear of any other way I will let you know.

I do see there are a few things that are not very friendly in this design. There is only so much I can do with pure CSS and a little JS, so it is hard to divide the height or make it act like an accordion menu. But I played around with some improvements and came to this design:

https://gyazo.com/c15ca3a82a7a806e92475dc5c2dfaa25

Basically the Inactive widgets/sidebars will remain in their current (old) position and can be shown by collapsing “Available Widgets”.

By default when moving a widget into the “Available Widgets” area, WordPress will show a small text saying “Deactivate …”. I doubt anyone notices this, so I can perhaps make this more visible in the new design.

I did a few more improvements and made it more clear to the user when removing a widget.

Would you be interested in testing it before I include it in a new release?

Replace /content-aware-sidebars/js/widgets.min.js with:
https://pastebin.com/XENdtnaR

Replace /content-aware-sidebars/css/style.css with:
https://pastebin.com/ipYRyDWB

Hi Joachim,

Sure I’ll look into it in the weekend and let you know what I think.
Thanks for taking this so serious ??