The Loop, Asides and Widgets
When widgets were first introduced, the API documentation suggested a number of cool widget ideas including a widget for “asides” – basically those separate streams of posts that don’t fit into the main blog stream and need their own space in the sidebar. Asides were the rage two years ago, but it seems like most blogs are moving away from them and using Twitter or something like that instead.
My point in mentioning asides is that they’re basically the WordPress Loop (the code in a theme that displays a list of posts) made into a widget. Since I’ve been working on building themes again (see Real Fusion), I’ve been thinking a lot about modularity of theme components and ways to make managing content on a site easier for the site owner and this of course lead me to think about The Loop and widgets, which then lead me to wonder how hard it would be to build an entire theme using widgets. Is it possible? Would it be useful? I’ve played with some test code and it’s definitely possible. I took my modularized Loop code from the Real Fusion site and started playing with options to make it work as a widget. It looks like it works great.
The real question is, “Why would anyone want to do this?” In the end, people use WordPress because it’s simple and not a full-blown CMS like Drupal that requires managing every block of content on the site. Themes are super simple ways to add some style to your site while not having to sweat the details of site design. Would anyone actually be interested in being able to create new loops, stack them on a page in any order or structure using the drag-and-drop widget admin, change them without having to mess with code (ex. list a single category of posts, and then change the category on the fly), etc.? I don’t know. What do you think?
I think that is a great idea, and is the way I think Drupal is moving as well. I’ve moved my group blog over to Wordpress from Drupal because so much effort seems to be spent on making in sane for the end user. Using a fully widgetized theme would be consistent with this.
As an urban planner, my interest is not only my own blog, but using blogs as tools in the public consultation process. Therefore despite Drupal’s many capabilities, ease of use for end users is primary.