Give Trac a sidebar widget provider

[lkraav <leho@…>]

I think it's about time. I searched "sidebar" through tickets and am not seeing any discussion about this topic throughout the years.

First, let's take wiki for example:

• there's plenty of horizontal room on the screen even with minimum resolutions (1024x)
• all room is currently filled with text…
• but usability guidelines say text readability starts to suffer at >600px width

So there's plenty of room available.

Second, ticket view:

• we simply have a centered ticket view, although having much better width for usability (compared to wiki), there's A LOT of whitespace filling the edges
• whitespace is monstrous with larger screens
• most importantly key pieces of information are mostly out of sight - i foresee launchpad style participant list, various statistics about the ticket, etc other useful things

Third, search view:

• faceted browsing, with ebay style checkboxes controlling search results

I'll stop here with the examples at the moment.

​th:FullBlogPlugin already has useful sidebars self-implemented. rjollos has also worked on ​th:TicketSidebarProviderPlugin. I hereby propose a universal sidebar area and some standardized Provider interfaces for plugin authors to fill them with their widgets if they so desire.

Sidebars should of course be optional for the user. I am not proposing that core start creating new widgets for the sidebar, at least not right off the bat. Perhaps some single widget as a learning example. Whatever comes over time, comes. I think many of the useful things people create can be adopted easily due to widgets usually being very focused and therefore small in code size.

Also, I just lately ran into a ​clean blog design with a position:fixed sidebar and absolutely loved the feeling of control there. Just a design experiment thought.

​WordPress for one, which I've lately worked with extensively, has a very polished widget system (and a lot more that Trac should adopt over time.. except PHP!) :>. This surely has affected my thinking about this. If any of the people interested in this want to have access to a demo site to get a feel of how it works there, I can easily provide access.

[Christian Boos]

Worth considering, yes.