Why are some many themes still widget unfriendly? Even new themes that say they "support widgets" are fairly widget unfriendly.

What I mean by this is everyone assumes a widget has to be in a side column, or in a few rare cases the footer. How come no one has widget areas in the header? Within the content itself. The underlying code seems to support this but theme developers ignore it. So really the topic of discussion is why is this important feature ignored? By ignoring, it theme developers restrict Wordpress to its blog niche and not enter the true CMS potential of the software.

Not everyone knows PHP or has the ability to edit templates but it seems that designers expect you to have this knowledge. Discuss...

Wayne,

This is a great question and one I've often wondered as well. If you don't mind, I may turn this into a WP Hacks post and see what the community has to say.

Though widgets are often overlooked, especially outside the sidebar(s), I know of at least one theme that doesn't. That is the Flexx theme from iThemes (though it isn't free). They set out to make the ultimate theme as far as flexibility, and it is almost completely widget based.

If I had to guess the reason, especially with free WordPress themes, it seems that most are a copy of other themes and then there are a few code changes and a lot of style changes. In other words the basic layouts are mostly all the same. Sidebar on the right, footer has the same elements usually, etc. There isn't a lot of innovation. If a few prominent theme designers added more widget capabilities, others would adapt as well in my opinion.

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I have also noticed this. I am afraid you are correct. It is a matter of all the sheep just following along. The developers are scared to go too far off the norm because then no-one will download their themes.

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With Wordpress being pushed more and more in CMS circles, I believe these changes will come in time. I notice the new Streamline theme from RevolutionTwo has a widgetized footer. Luckily I was able to grab a copy for review before they went commercial again and removed the download links. I digress though. The Streamline style has three widget areas in the footer of each page plus the sidebar. If I do use it, I'll probably add an area in the main content above the featured post, below the featured post and above the footer. Might add a leaderboard directly under the header as a widget as well. It seems to me that instead of using custom theme fields and options, that Widgetized areas are the best way include advertising among other things.

In my 10 years of experience with community-oriented sites, mainly forums, most people see a website and want one just like it. I would estimate that 60% of Jelsoft's customers (makers of vBulletin) do not know HTML. Of the remaining 40% of customers who do know HTML for the majority of them its basic coding or cut and paste from viewing source code and visiting tutorials. Probably about 10% of the customers know more including CSS, Javascript and PHP. The ratios are probably the same with Wordpress and other downloadable software packages.

I came to Wordpress for its ease of use in developing sites. I had spent months on building a site with Drupal 6 and it just didn't have the functionality I wanted which was mainly ease of use. I want to get to a place where I can just publish content and not have to worry about constantly tweaking the software. The same site that took me 6 months with Drupal took 6 hour with Wordpress. That is pretty impressive in my opinion. The thing about Drupal is that many of its templates/skins/styles had 6-9 widgetized areas.. Header, Footer, Left sidebar, Right sidebar, above content, below content were the most common. One template I downloaded had 22 widgetized areas on the front page.

Anyway, would like more opinions and maybe some ideas on how to get designers to think outside the box.

The premium themes normally lead the way. The changes, if and when they come, will most likely start with the premium themes and then everyone else will follow these new trends. The whole cycle will simply just be repeated.

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But does one have to pay for a premium theme before finding out if it's really widget friendly?

Usually premium themes list their features before buying, but you can also rely on word of mouth as well. Post your questions about a specific theme on a forum like this one

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