14 DAY TRIAL // WordPress is trying to tackle a problem that any WordPress user has faced. Different themes have different widget slots, or areas, and changing from one theme to another means that widgets get removed or added.
Changing back to a previous theme does not bring your widgets back though, meaning that you have to re-add and reconfigure those widgets every time you change a theme.
This leaves users with two options, none of which is particularly appealing, either they don't change the theme as much as they'd want, or they put in the work every time they switch.
Obviously, this is not ideal and WordPress is thinking of ways of fixing this. But there are non-technical issues as well, which is why the group is asking for your help.
"Imagine being able to change themes and modify widgets as needed, and if you decided to go back to your old theme, it would return your widgets to how they were the last time you had that theme activated," WordPress writes.
"Sounds good, yeah? The problem we’re facing is deciding how long to save the old widget configuration, since there are so many potential workflows," it says.
The question is, when to revert the changes and when to keep them. For example, if you switch to a theme, add a few widgets, customize them and so on, and then switch back to your old theme, do you want the old widgets or do you want to keep the ones you've added after the switch?
WordPress is asking users to decide the time after which changes will be discarded. There's a poll where you can mark your option, ranging from "until you log out" to forever. WordPress plans to have this feature sorted by the time WordPress 3.3 comes out.
There could be other options though, for example, users could be asked, when switching back to a theme whether they would want to go back to the widget configuration as well.