WordPress Multi-Widget Class

[itsananderson]

So the plugin can take a widget that isn't a multi-widget and make it one on the fly? That sounds impressive, but I wonder how well it works (if that's what it does).

[PeterButler]

I assume when 2.8 is released, legacy widgets are still going to be supported? Seems like there would be a pretty high number of unworking widgets out there if they didn't.

[itsananderson]

Well, I think the multi-widget plugin just automates the multi-widget creation that already exists, so it shouldn't break old plugins. I'd imagine that future releases might, but it wouldn't make sense to stop support in the same release that includes the class.

[andrea_r]

The new class has almost all the exact same code in it. The only thing now is, when you write a widget, there was a line in there about registering.

Now you don't need that line.

That's all we could find.

[Jeffro]

The way I read into it, all of the regular old widgets will still work. However, if they choose to update them so that we can use more than one instance of them at a time, it will be very easy to add that bit of code to the widget.

[davecoveney]

Old multi-instance widgets do break in the new version. At least, they do for us, and that's likely to be the case for a lot of other theme/plugin authors, sadly.

It's easy to fix, just a bit of a pain, especially if you want to keep backward compatibility, which is a big thing for us with released themes. Custom themes are less of a problem - usually they're current theme and forward.

[itsananderson]

Well that sounds like fun :)

I'm surprised they haven't at least provided limited backward compatibility.