Major Improvements to Widgets in Wordpress 2.8

I’ve been working with Wordpress 2.8 for just a day and I’m already loving some of the changes. Two of the biggest changes have to do with widgets.

If you’ve worked with Wordpress for any length of time, you’ve probably pulled your hair out as much as I have. It’s been frustrating to lose text widgets when you want to move them from one sidebar to another.

Wordpress 2.8 features a completely redesigned widget management panel. With the new and improved system you can now drag and drop widgets between sidebar areas. This is a vast improvement over the previous version. I would still like to see the ability to move text widgets back to the “holding area” since there are times when I want to remove a widget temporarily. For example, if I teach the same class every 3-months I might want a widget that I post in the sidebar for a few weeks before the start of each class. Still can’t do that.

But the ability to move widgets around is great!

And they’ve also added the option to automatically add paragraphs to text widgets. This is another big improvement. One of questions I get asked all the time is how to get paragraph breaks into a text widget. It’s not really a difficult process to enter the html code for paragraphs or breaks, but for folks just starting out can feel a bit intimidating. No need to worry about that anymore. Just put a checkmark in the box to “Automatically add paragraphs” and you’re good to go!

So if you haven’t upgraded to Wordpress 2.8, I’d say go for it. Just make sure you read my previous post on deactivating your plugins before upgrading wordpress!