Preview wigdets before publish

[JonezJeA]

Why isn't this possible yet? Before publishing a widget that you can preview it. That way you can get the right settings out without first needing to publish it for the whole site viewers.
A preview would be very nice before publishing a wigdet like editting a post...

Why isn't this possible yet? - Because it's not possible yet. Widgets are not designed like posts, so they don't have any preview. Technically that's basically because each widget has it's own way of storing it's configuration data. So as long as the individual widget is not providing a preview functionality, there is not much about it.

This would need a definition of the widget system first and a redisign of it's architecture. I don't see this within the next couple years. Sorry.

I see, then this may be closed no?

I don't think this would need a redesign of the architecture.

Each widget defines its own configuration and markup, yes. And that is used by the theme. However, showing a preview of the widget's view would be more like showing a preview of a new theme before activation (which is already possible).

All we'd need to do is add a property to the WP_Widget object (from which all widgets are derived) that defines whether or not a particular widget instance is active. I assume we already have something similar to this because you can store "inactive" widgets on the Widgets management panel.

But it should be relatively straight-forward to present a "what-if" view of the site's home page with a specific set of widgets. This could render in a lightbox similar to the theme preview.

So ... could we have this in 3.2? Maybe. Could we have this by 3.3? Definitely.

I agree with you Ericmann.
Is it meaby possible to make a so called publish like the theme previews on Wordpress.com

Wanting more advanced widget controls, like previewing, was always intended as a v2 feature when we did the redux of widgets in 2.8. We just never got around to it b/c the widget code is a mess and azaozz was the only one who was really working with it.

Is a clean up of that code not a good idea also?

@JonezJea: Yes, it's a good idea. Patches extremely welcome.

Version field indicates when the feature was initially suggested.