The widgets I have seen so far are mainly on the sidebar of the blogs. Although you could play around with the positions of the widgets by dragging and dropping them wherever you like, I first encountered something like that with Canvas.

What is Canvas?
Canvas (from Fresh Pursuits) is something you could use to customize your WordPress blog without knowing anything about PHP and CSS. Blogging newbies are welcome to try this! It was a really interesting experience. You could have your layout in this admin interface and you have blocks and blocks of your layout in front of you. You could also add similar elements by drag and drop too. And you just need to click the particular block to customize it. You even have a color palette so you could easily choose colors that you want for your blog.

Why widgetize themes when you have Canvas?

I didn’t totally love the way Canvas worked. It is nice in the sense that you could easily drag and drop ‘boxes’ into your layout and customize them. I think it was mainly working with the Ink part/color palette that I didn’t like much. In any case, at least having themes that are widgets ready would make it easier to somehow manage. Especially if you are using WordPress MU to manage your blogs. That way you could let each blogger on your server to tweak their blogs to their hearts’ desires as long as you have themes that allow that.

Also, it could sometimes be easier to modify by hand the CSS of your WordPress theme. So if you already have widgets, you’re one happy blogger who will customize as the entries come and go.

Maybe there were already widgets before Canvas came out. I don’t really know for sure. All I know is that they both make customizing blogs so much fun and easier too!

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