Widget UX: Widgets appear on incompatible page types

[PsukheDelos]

A confusing aspect of widgets is that they appear on page types in which they are incompatible and/or do not have the template code necessary to display the widget.

An example of incompatibility would be the widgets included with the Blog Module. These widgets (e.g. Archive, Blog Categories, Recent Posts, Blog Tags Cloud, Blog Tags) will appear in the widget section of all page types. However, not all page types will have concept of Archives, Categories, etc. making these widgets inherently incompatible with most other page types apart from Blog Posts / Blogs.

Another example is the HTML Content widget. Recently this has been included in the CWP Recipe. If a user builds a website from the base Watea/Starter theme, this widget will really only be able to be displayed on Blogs (out of the box) as Blog by default has templates capable of displaying Widgets, while regular pages do not make use of widgets at all and therefore will not display this. While this particular widget is compatible with any page type (due to its generic user created nature) it is not actually able to be used with any pages as the templates lack the code necessary to due so.

I think there should be a mechanism to allow developers to explicitly define the page types that a widget is compatible with which would result in a better user experience. This would reduce user confusion about which widgets they can use on a particular page as incompatible or unimplemented widgets would not be an option to them. Instead, the responsibility would be on the developer to explicitly define which page types the widget is meant to work with.

Just thought I would kick off a conversation about this. Happy for any feedback! 😄 Hope everyone is having a nice day! 😄

-Glen

[clarkepaul]

Cheers @PsukheDelos that does sound like a pretty major UX issue. It sounds like if there are no compatible templates the widget should not be available to CMS users. I'm increasing the impact rating.