Back end widget organization tools

Hi Folks!
I’m not sure this is the place for such a request. I’d like to see a way of organizing widgets.

I’m a co-owner of a small newspaper, and we use WP as our CMS. We process a lot of information and use widgets (mostly text or PHP) in our sidebars frequently to announce breaking news. We have several types of breaking news — e.g, obit, weather, breaking story, video, custom formatting, etc. — each of which is represented by a specific widget.

Currently, there are two areas, available widgets and inactive widgets, which contain widgets. If I’m looking for, say, an obit widget, I have to hunt through the dozens of widgets to find it.

I’d like to be able to create more areas, sort of like “widget folders”, maybe organized by tabs, which could hold specific types of inactive widgets that could be pressed into service as needed.

As WP is shoehorned into more and more sophisticated tasks, I think it’s important to produce more back-end organizational tools. Some have done this via plug-ins like Jump Menu or Media Categories, allowing users to sort and organize more efficiently, especially with as large a database as a newspaper generates. Perhaps this architecture could be opened to plug-in development, as one would register a widget area on a theme.

Sorry for the ramble, but THANKS!
Matt Minde, Yellow Springs News (ysnews.com)