Create widget categories

[flixos90]

Many users face the issue that they have a lot of widgets on their sites.

Finding a specific widget can be a little too time-consuming in these cases and there is no way of grouping widgets - although they often serve completely different purposes.

Furthermore, having a lot of widgets sometimes results in a bad workflow where, if the user wants to insert a widget which shows at the bottom of the screen into a widget area, he/she has to start dragging the widget, scroll all the way to the top of the page and paste the widget there since the widget area is placed somewhere at the top of the screen.

I would propose a kind of category mechanism for the widgets. This could either...

• work like a taxonomy where users can add new groups and assign their widgets to them or...
• be handled by the plugin / theme adding the widget

While the first idea is more flexible, it involves a little work on the user side when setting up a site, and I feel like it also might confuse some users. That's why I personally prefer the second approach. In the following, I will describe my thoughts about this approach (a code-managed grouping of widgets) in a more detailed way:

We would need to think of a way that this could work. It could be...

• source-based (automatic): where does the widget come from? either 'WordPress', name of a plugin or name of a theme
• component-based (manual): this could be a new 'component' setting defined in the widget class' $widget_options
• more ideas?

Here I would suggest using the second approach, however we would also need to think whether the plugin/theme author adding the widget could just add any component name he/she wants or (which I would prefer) whether the available component names should be limited: For example, it could be component names similar to those Component names used on Trac to categorize a ticket (of course not actually the same names, but a similar approach). Maybe there could be some default component names, but we could also add a function register_widget_group() which a developer could use to add an additional group.

Opinions? Is that something worth thinking about? In my opinion it would greatly improve the widgets screen experience.

[flixos90]

Also, I see some widgets already adding some kind of category by just appending it to the widget's name (for example all Jetpack plugins are suffixed with (Jetpack). To me this further manifests the impression that we should consider adding an actual way to categorize widgets.

[welcher]

Possible duplicate #19912

[audrasjb]

Looks like porting the widget screen to Gutenberg is going to Make this happen. Closing this old ticket as maybelater