Change to default widget behavior / ui

[heather_r]

1) Default widgets do not appear as added widgets under Appearance > Widgets. To clear them out, a user must add a blank text widget. There is no text describing this process.

2) When a user adds a widget to the defaults, all of the defaults disappear. This is very confusing and has led to a number of support requests.

Recommended action: Display default widgets as added under Appearance > Widgets, so users can remove and add without encountering these issues.

[mtdewvirus]

The major problem is that most themes aren't using widget functions in the static sidebars. They are calling other WordPress functions directly.

[azaozz]

Mtdewvirus is right. This can be fixed reliably only in the themes. The only possible fix in core would be to change dynamic_sidebar() to always return true but that may have other implications.

[ryan]

This has been fixed for the default theme. As good as we'll likely get.