Reuse how widgets work

[j-falk]

I saw that you wrote in the comments for the GSoC: Editor Experiments blog post that you wanted shortcodes and widgets merged into one concept and been thinking about this for sometime myself. Shortcodes can be very difficult to use unless there are some type of shortcode generator (which I guess this editor expermient really is).

Widgets on the other hand has been brougth in to the customizer in a very nice way in the recent WordPress updates and also have an interface for the user to easily edit and configure a widget.

Wouldn't it be better if we could reuse some of that work for the editor and also more consistent for the user if these interfaces worked and looked sort of the same?

Below is how widgets are displayed with an icon and short description and then also searchable from within the customizer.

Then you can customize the widget with fields and dropdowns that are defined by the widget.

[ellatrix]

That's what this plugin will do. You'll always need a shortcode in the editor to save the settings an location, but you'll never see the actual shortcode itself if the plugin that registers it supports a preview for it. I'm afraid you can't reuse anything from the widgets.

Content blocks could also be searchable. :)

[j-falk]

Too bad you can't reuse any code from the widgets but then I guess it could be about trying to reuse some of the look and feel from how widgets works.

The search would probably be very helpful, especially if you have a lot of content blocks.

Maybe more important, and now I look at from when we create custom themes for our customers, is to limit what content blocks are available for the user. This could probably be connected to templates, so eg. we have a created a template in the theme which is called testimonials and that only includes a content block called testimonial.

Another approach instead of limiting available content blocks could be to rather highlight certain content blocks which are more appropriate to use on different templates. Maybe thinking to far ahead but just some thoughts.