Wordpress 2.2

Sorry, one last thing...

Have you tried disabling the WordPress widgets and then still using SBM?

A quick search revealed that they do enable widgets with an action (big plus for them from me on that), so therefore you can disable them the same way:

remove_action('plugins_loaded', 'wp_maybe_load_widgets', 0 );

You can add this to a plugin (or make a standalone plugin out of it), and then your SBMs should still work as before, unless there are other conflicts.

OK, I'm back to eat my words on part of that...

Just out of curiosity I did check and it widget support in 2.2 was started on 4/22, so not a "full" month, but pretty darn close. Also, since it was the first major feature started only a few days after the 2.2 branch was created, I'm thinking that's a big sign that it's a primary feature of this release.

Well, to be fair, you can't really blame WordPress for that. They (or their company, I should say) came out with their own "widgets" plugin, and so it's pretty obvious that they would base their future releases on variations of that. I'll let you know how well my widgets (which were only tested under the Automattic Widgets plugin because I figured that was the safer long term bet) will fair once I set up 2.2. I'm guessing / hoping it will be a smoother transition for me because of that.

I think that more of the responsibility for this particular instance of the breakage lies with the SBM author and/or the people who put together very popular themes based on SBM. I'm not bagging on them because I don't know what their personal schedules / commitment levels are, but if I had a plugin that was that widely used, I'd feel some responsibility to keep up with current (SVN level) WordPress developement and make sure that an upcoming release is not going to break my plugin, and if it is, have a fix ready prior to the WP version release. Now, I don't know how long the widget changes had been in SVN prior to the 2.2 release date, but I'm guessing at least a full month.

Good news #1 is that SBM does use a free enough license that you (or someone else) can make the modifications necessary to "un-break" it yourself. Chances are someone already has by this point, but if you were the first/best/most popular to do so, you would surely get a lot of traffic, on the plus side.

Basically, I never seriously considered using SBM, and this is exactly why. I do understand the benefits to the extra features that it provides, but at the same time when you have a feature (in this case "widgets") that is such an obvious candidate for inclusion into the core AND you have several implementations of that feature but one of them is made by the primary core devs, it's a pretty easy prediction which of those implementations will end up being chosen, for better or worse.

All that to say, maybe it's time for me to look into writing a new plugin or two....

Sorry, but now I'm really ticked. One thing I really loved about sbm was the way you can select whether it showed up on post pages, archives or the home or whatever. Now I'm stuck with all of these "widgets" on pages I don't want. And I'm going to spend hours getting it back to where I want.

This has got to be the worst upgrade I've ever done.

I totally understand. Luckily for me I just swapped ISPs and reinstalled the new Wordpress 2.2 version from scratch. I was using the Sidebar Widgets plugin so I'll be rebuilding too. Good luck.

That's progress for you... I'll have to check out the new version.

Even if it does introduce some initial difficulties with theme authors, I'm glad they're finally including widgets in the core system. It's the kind of thing that shouldn't be a plugin because then you get different ones out there doing it slightly differently and if you want to write a plugin to be a "widget" you have to either take all those variations into account or limit your support to one particular widget system.