Yes, they were released into the wild while I was sleeping. The Widgets Plugin post announced on the Dev Blog heralded the arrival on the scene of the widget-world to non-WordPress.com users. I had heard about them and had been patiently waiting to see them in action. I’m cool with them at first blush. I still need to play around with them some more, but I like it.
I wanted to install it using Subversion for this K2 themed blog and was panicking that I’d have to check it out and then distribute the files hither and yon throughout my WordPress install. Happily, I read the fine print and all was well.
It will also work if you place the php script files in the plugins directory or any subdirectory thereof. It will also work if you place the scriptaculousdirectory in the same directory as widgets.php. It will also work if you store the RSS icon alongside widgets.php. It's pretty flexible.
So I quickly jumped into wp-content/plugins/, issued a svn checkout http://svn.wp-plugins.org/widgets/trunk/ widgets and then I was off to the races after activating the plugin.
Thanks Automattic for releasing this nice feature to the rest of the WordPress community — also, thanks to K2 for having a widget-ready theme.
Now I have to go meddle with this blog and another to take advantage of the rearranging goodness that now I am able to do.
