pfSense

PR https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/pull/3465 provides a first part of addressing this. It allows the user to choose which rows of data are displayed on the System Information widget. That will cover the case where the user just wants to see a subset of the information, and the length on the screen is then short enough.

The other use case is where the user wants to see all (or most) of the data, but not have it so long that the widget is longer than the screen height. For that some system is needed to be able to break up the widget into parts and put them in different columns.

And I have a feeling that breaking up the System Information widget has been discussed before, so there may be another Redmine feature request somewhere in the system.

It has come up before, at least on the forum, but I don't see an existing ticket for it yet. I agree it would be nice to split it up eventually, it's getting rather large these days.

Stage1 done - PR 3456 has been merged. So users can cut down the amount of content in the existing widget.
Now to think about the best way to provide options to break it up into multiple widgets.

RELENG_2_3_3 and RELENG_2_3 have a consistent implementation of being able to filter the content displayed in various widgets, including the System Information widget.

In master, we now have:
https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/commit/0172a197518358e2930bc8b6213edfe2d35efe75 - Redmine 7182 Allow multiple copies of widgets on dashboard
https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/commit/071d8a610047fe1994c9fa28e339fe93f4498c73 - Upgrade widget settings for multiple copies of widgets
https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/commit/11daee3fba24e349e415fd27885a424e8a1a95a0 - Bump config rev for widget preference setting changes

This allows the user to have multiple copies of a widget on the dashboard, and chose which items to display in each copy of the widget. So they can break up the System Information widget as they like, and break up other widgets that potentially have a lot of rows (e.g. Interfaces, Interface Statistics, OpenVPN...) or put multiple Firewall Log widgets that show different filtered sets of log entries and so on.

That gives lots of flexibility to the user to manage their own dashboard layout.

This all stores as user-specific dashboard layout if that option is selected for theu ser, so potentially each user can customize their own dashboard as they wish.

Remaining "todo": Traffic Graphs widget code needs to be changed so that it will work with multiple Traffic Graphs widgets on the dashboard, each displaying their own subset of interfaces.
At the moment, a lot of the Traffic Graphs widget JS uses global stuff and needs to be refactored.

PR https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/pull/3707 adds the ability to customize the widget title for widgets that have filters/options. It is a sort-of related enhancement to this, because when users have multiple copies of a widget on the dashboard with different options/filters selected, it will be handy to give them the option to customize each widget title.