Hi MountainStream,
To stay simple, we decided to create a new widget specificly taylored for this purpose rather than changing how other widget works. This allows us to build a richer, dedicated UI into the widgets panel without having to worry about potential conflicts with other plugins. This should make it a lot easy to maintain and add new fetures down the road. If you really want something that combines several widgets together, you can try the tabbed widgets plugin. However, our experience with this plugin is so great, which eventually motivated us to add the tabs functionailty into our plugin.
However, in this new version, we have enabled shortcodes support in the widget body which makes the plugin VERY flexible and extendable. For example, the WP-Cumulus and WP-Poll plugin both come with a shortcode. Therefore, if you need the cumulus in a tab, you simply put [wp-cumulus] in the tab’s content. Similarly, you can use [poll] or [page_polls] to put polls in a tabbed widget. (Consult wp-polls’ documentation for details) For archives, you can try the Template Tag Shortcodes plugin. (Check its excellent readme file for details – look for the [wp_get_archives] shortcode.) From our experience, this approach is much more maintainable than the other approach taken by the tabbed widgets plugin. But you might want to give both a try before you decide.
Hope it helps!
Godfrey
For your other question, I don’t see why this widget won’t work with your other widget areas. However, just make sure you have at placed an empty tabbed section widget in both of the widget areas before you run the “scope detector”. (This would make sense once you installed the plugin – just follow the instructions in the options page.)
