scriptygoddess

In case you hadn't heard (and if you're using wordpress, how could you NOT have heard) WordPress 2.8 is out. One of the features included in this round was a rework of the way Widgets work – including a easier to use API. In light of this, I made use of the new API (armed with this great tutorial and sample file) and created some custom widgets for my clients.

A few problems:
I needed to use TinyMCE for one of the textareas, (There's some good information here on how to do that) because the client doesn't know and doesn't want to know HTML. Trying to apply TinyMCE to the textarea in a widget presented all kind of problems.

Also – just simply dragging and dropping the widgets onto the correct sidebar was excruciating slow.

The solution to both of these problems was solved in the 2.8 FAQ – specifically – turning on "Accessibility Mode" in the screen options for the widgets page. It's not as snazzy as it was before – but being excruciatingly slow and TinyMCE not working isn't snazzy either. So I'll take "functional" over "Snazzy but not functional".

Anyway – just putting this out there for anyone else running into similar problems.