[drupal-devel] Widgets (was Enable multiple block regions (not just "left" and "right" sidebars))

[Robert Douglass]

factoryjoe,

Your idea of "shareable layouts" and semantic layouts has a word 
already; widget. Isn't that true? Here you have touched on an important 
point - Drupal doesn't do widgets well. The widgets that we have now are 
the form_xxx functions in common.inc, but almost nobody ever uses 
anything but the default widget. Why? Because it is too hard to get 
overriding theme functions into your code and you can't share them easily.

When I read your description of a "Person" layout, I think more 
immediately to date selectors. We have this really great event module 
which has a crappy way of entering dates. Much better would be one of 
the dozens of nifty calendar widgets that people have coded on 
SourceForge. Those are widgets.

What I'd expect from a widget is that I can find it in a repository on 
Drupal, understand from a png what is it, drop it into a directory on my 
Drupal install, and activate it on a site/module basis (kind of like 
HTMLArea does with textareas). This is impossible now because the widget 
would have to belong to a theme or module to get included.

The best widgets available in the Drupal world at the moment are the 
field.incs of flexinode, and it demonstrates what can happen if the 
widget loading mechanism is abstracted. I contributed a color picker 
(don't know if anyone ever used it) which is a perfect example of what I 
mean. There are many other ways to do a color picker, and anybody could 
contribute them too - just give them a different name and drop them into 
the flexinode/contrib dir. Then when it comes time to choose a color, 
there is a choice of tools on how to get the job done.

There are a couple things we'd need in order to make our theme system 
widget aware. First, we'd need a widgets directory (naming open) that 
gets scanned and the file paths saved in system. Widgets can only work 
if they are drop-in code, not dependent on being loaded from a specific 
theme.

Then we'd need a way of making a theme method widget aware. There is 
currently a hierarchy of places Drupal looks when looking for a 
theme('widget', x, y, z) function. It should be possible, probably from 
the administrator UI, to activate widgets that would then be pushed to 
the front of the line in this hierarchy.

Widgets need not be limited to input forms or interactive UI elements. 
Anything with a theme method could take a widget. Like the Person 
example - there could be several Person widgets, each of which put the 
"name" and "picture" in different places, etc.

Adrian was messaging me some of his ideas for the future of Drupal 
theming and it sounded like this sort of functionality was definitely a 
part of it, so perhaps he'll chime in with his views.

As for the regions that chx and Ber are working on, I see that as 
completely separate to widgets, but that the two of them go hand-in-hand 
for making Drupal even easier to theme.

cheers,

Robert