Can my users create custom widgets / how do you create widgets? [#838432]

Hi there! So, I'd like my users to be able to create widgets for their various interests - for example, a widget that will "follow" the contributions of a particular user, a widget that will "follow" any posts tagged with a particular vocabulary term, etc.

It seems this is possible with Drupal's own Dashboard installation (see http://groups.drupal.org/node/21166) but I can't figure out how to achieve this in my Dashboard installation. When I click "Add a Widget", there are very few fields - "title", "description", "tags", and "widget" - and I can't figure out how to make something using that interface. I don't even understand what those fields mean exactly.

Does Dashboard even have the capability to allow users to customize their own widgets (i.e., to only follow topics tagged with "peanut butter" or see recent posts by user "jane doe")??

I'm a beginner and I'd really appreciate it if anyone might be able to break this down for me! Or if someone could point me to some documentation about Dashboard I'd be grateful!

Thanks!!

Comments

Comment #1

webwriter CreditAttribution: webwriter commented 14 July 2010 at 00:44

I'm also interested to see if widgets are 'portable', ie, can someone put a widget on their blog of content from their Drupal site. Apologies if this is not the right place to ask, but it seems close!

Comment #2

Anonymous (not verified) CreditAttribution: Anonymous commented 15 July 2010 at 14:29

Right now, no, users cannot create their own widgets per se, like there is no 'Add Widget' button that just does this.

The main issue is with personalization, right now we have the module built to expose all widgets to anyone using the dashboard. There would be no way to hide the widgets from other users. The other issue is with how to support the widgets, right now blocks and nodes can be made into widgets, and we need to work out what kind of things people can put in their dashboards. Executable code, for instance, probably is not a good idea.

We are planning a release for next week that will include a fairly large set of feature updates, including multi-dashboard support and default dashboard widget placement. Once that is out the door, user generated widgets is one of the first things on my list.