By far the most complex plugin is the RNW Sidebar Widgets plugin. This single plugin provides the ability to add 12 custom sidebar widgets to a theme sidebar Some of these widgets offer unique features, while others simply provide enhanced capabilities over the standard widgets issues with WordPress.

As soon as I saw the WordPress 2.5 Widgets window, I knew I was in trouble. The whole way that widgets are configured has been significantly changed from Version 2.3 to Version 2.5.

Surprisingly, the RNW Widgets plugin activated without a problem. And when I opened the Presentation | Widgets page, all the RNW widgets were listed. Even the Options page for the widgets opened. I started hoping that the WordPress team had somehow managed to enable the old style widgets to work with WP 2.5.

No such luck.

I was able to add a RNW widget to a sidebar. Even open an options form. But as soon as I tried saving the defined options, the newly added widget disappeared.

The changes basically required a rewrite of 12 widgets. During the process, I decided to make most of the widgets ‘multi-instance. What I mean by this is that many of the standard WordPress widgets are single-instance - or single-use. So - add one of these widgets to a sidebar, and then you cannot add it anywhere else. With the fact that RNW supports silo website design, it’s important to be able to uze a widget more than once in a theme.

One nice feature about the new Widgets interface is that there are no longer any droplists for multi-instance widgets. These droplists were used in earlier WordPress versions to define how many instances of that widget were required. The new widget format is such that it automatically adds a new instance of the widget each time you add the widget to one of the sidebars.

Ok - a few hours later - and we’ve only done one plugin …