Diving Into WordPress 5.8’s New Widgets Screen
It has been a while since I have touched widgets. Once the site editor landed in the Gutenberg plugin, I almost exclusively dropped the old sidebar paradigm and moved to block templates. Reactivating old themes and jumping into the widgets screen felt like time-traveling into a bygone era. After months of being deeply embedded within block themes, it is hard to imagine moving back to the sidebar widgets system that most WordPress users are still using today. WordPress 5.8 is slated to ship with a small taste of bringing blocks outside of the content editor. However, it can feel like a surface-level refresh of a dying system, one that does not always work. Block-based widgets are part of the transitional phase between classic WordPress and the future, which centers on a complete site editor. Once the bulk of themes are built atop blocks, the need for widgets will wane. The site editor and block themes do not support the old sidebar system. Instead, users will be able to place blocks anywhere. Last October, I asked the question: Are Block-Based Widgets Ready To Land in WordPress 5.6? At the time, the widgets screen was expected to launch with the final release…
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