WordPress 2.5 Widgets page is terrible.
I thought I had to be doing something wrong, because I couldn’t seem to manipulate the widgets in anywhere near an efficient manner. I suppose if you had just one sidebar it’s probably not such a big deal. Anymore than one sidebar though, and you have to switch (Show) between each sidebar to see which widgets are there. The worst part (actually it gets worse below) is if you add a widget to a sidebar then want to move it from that sidebar to a different one. Let me explain the steps to do this, each word in bold is a click of a button:
- Show Sidebar 2.
- Remove Widget from Sidebar2.
- Save The fact you removed that Widget.
- Show Sidebar 1.
- Add Widget to Sidebar 1.
- Save The addition of that Widget.
Six clicks / steps to move a widget from one sidebar to another, and that’s simplifying it, there are other clicks of course just to get to and from, etc. Imagine having to do that with every widget you want to move. That seems silly considering before 2.5 all you had to do was drag a widget from one sidebar to another, all while on the same page, and then click Save. You could move multiple widgets between multiple sidebars and then click save. Now if you want to move 3 widgets to different sidebars you’ll have 18 clicks / steps ahead of you, where as before that same process would take 4 clicks / steps. Was this done on purpose? Even if the answer is no, this is a huge (stupid) step backwards.
If all of that wasn’t dumb enough for you, I have more. Lets say you create a Text widget with some HTML in it. If you want to move that from one sidebar to another, you have to Remove that widget from the sidebar it is currently on, and when you do that it deletes the widget altogether. Meaning you’re not really moving it, but deleting it and recreating it where you want it. Be ready to add copying and pasting to the list of extra steps. Dumb!
