Live search of available widgets

[danielbachhuber]

On sites with lots of widgets, the act of scrolling to the bottom of the Widgets page, clicking a widget, and dragging the widget all the way to the top where your sidebar drop zone is can be painful.

Similar to the implementation of live search for themes, it would be nice to have a search box at the top of the "Available Widgets" div such that a user could use keywords to filter to a subset of available widgets.

Related #27112

[SergeyBiryukov]

Replying to danielbachhuber:

On sites with lots of widgets, the act of scrolling to the bottom of the Widgets page, clicking a widget, and dragging the widget all the way to the top where your sidebar drop zone is can be painful.

That's why you don't have to drag since #25821 :)

[jenmylo]

Replying to SergeyBiryukov:

That's why you don't have to drag since #25821 :)

Yeah, but the UI is not clear on this at all. To someone just coming to the screen without knowledge of that dev project, it looks like a one-column list that is painful to scroll up and down and drag. (Literally, in the case of anyone with RSI that makes mousing/trackpadding painful.)

I think the widgets screen needs another design revision to address this, but until such time as someone jumps on that, adding a search per Daniel's suggestion would be a decent stopgap.

[ocean90]

For the Customizer jQuery.liveFilter was used before. Now it's a Backbone view with filters the widget collection, same as on the themes screen.
So let us Backbonifying the widgets admin UI. :)

[westonruter]

Replying to ocean90:

So let us Backbonifying the widgets admin UI. :)

Created #28093.

[nofearinc]

This is something that we have implemented for a theme framework and it works great according to the clients - maybe an idea for UI filtering implementation?

[McGuive7]

I really like this concept! So I built a plugin to demo the functionality: ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-search-filter/

It uses the lightweight jQuery liveFilter plugin, with very minimal PHP and one CSS rule. Thoughts? It'd be super easy to implement this in core, however I'm not sure it meets the 80% rule, and as @ocean90 mentions, it might make sense to just Backbonify the widgets UI entirely.

Either way, at least you can use this plugin until another solution is implemented more centrally.

[McGuive7]

Bump. Anyone?

[karmatosed]

I think searching of widgets makes a lot of sense. As its your area @melchoyce, noting you here as something to consider with the Customizer focus. My concern is time / process to search but it could be a nice improvement.

[melchoyce]

I'm not sure this is as much of an issue since widgets in the Customizer are searchable. If someone's really passionate about this, sure, feel free to work on it, but I don't see the Customization focus making any improvements to widgets.php, especially as we start converting widgets to blocks.

[dlh]

#47540 was marked as a duplicate.

[Mahesh901122]

Somehow recent image was broken so uploaded new one.

[Mahesh901122]

Quick GIF preview.

[peterwilsoncc]

The widgets screen was replaced in 5.8 and the legacy widgets screen placed in maintenance mode. As this is an enhancement, I'm going to close the ticket off.