Widgets: Making Your Site Great and Letting Others Help

Who Am I?

What is a Widget?

Why Bother with Widgets – Part 1 They let you put interesting things in your side bar. Whoppee!! Re-usable User-Friendly It's Harder to Break Your Site

What do I need to start the fun?

Built In Widgets The Text Widget

Extending the Text Widget

Adding AdSense? Use a Widget!

Built In Widgets The RSS Widget

Installing New Widgets Zip File

Favorite Widgets Twitter Tools ( http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress ) Twitter Tracker ( http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tracker/ ) FlickrRSS ( http://eightface.com/wordpress/flickrrss/ )

Why Use/Make a Widget?

Case Study - SuperPages.com

SuperPages.com – Widget Options

SuperPages.com Search Results

Case Study - Constant-Content Personalized Dynamic Content Search Engine Friendly Text link

You Could Have a Widget!

Badges and Dynamic Content Basic Widget = one link, one picture <a href=' http://www.reddotcampaign.ca '> <img src=' http://www.reddotcampaign.ca/badge.png ' alt='Red Dot Campaign' /> </a> Dynamic Widget = Personalized Dynamic Content There's no limit to how sophisticated your widget can be Check out www.widgetbox.com for some ideas! <script type="text/javascript" src="http://cdn.widgetserver.com/syndication/subscriber/InsertWidget.js"></script><script>if (WIDGETBOX) WIDGETBOX.renderWidget('1e046775-132f-4fbe-8c64-f8b5b8529ffe');</script><noscript>Get the <a href="http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/eco-calculator">Eco-Calculator</a> widget and many other <a href="http://www.widgetbox.com/">great free widgets</a> at <a href="http://www.widgetbox.com">Widgetbox</a>! Not seeing a widget? (<a href="http://docs.widgetbox.com/using-widgets/installing-widgets/why-cant-i-see-my-widget/">More info</a>)</noscript>

When Should I Build a Wordpress Widget Best Times For a Widget:
When you want it to be super easy for people
When you need server side processing
When you want access to Data in other pieces of data in your blog

Build Your Own Widget A widget can consist of just one file “my-widget.php” File has five basic section:
Initialization
Install Section
Uninstall Section
Control Section
Display Section

Build Your Own Widget Initialization Section
Register The Installation Code so that Wordpress knows how to install the widget
Register The Uninstallation Code so that Wordpress knows how to remove the widget
Register the Initialization Code so that Wordpress knows what to do when a widget is needed by the front end or backend.

Build Your Own Widget Installation Section
If your plugin requires that some data be saved in the database, like a user name, you can add the parts that you want to save as name-value pairs
add_option("vic_user_id", '', '', 'yes');
Beautifully simple :-)

Build Your Own Widget Uninstallation Section
Clean up after yourself!
Remove the name-value pairs that you created
delete_option("vic_user_id", '', '', 'yes');
Beautifully simple :-)

Build Your Own Widget Control Section
This is the portion where we build the interface for administration
This allows you to alter the values stored in the database name value pairs.
Usually it consists of a form that is displayed and some code to save the new values.
update_option("vic_user_id", $_POST['vic_id']);

Build Your Own Widget The Display Section
Grab the necessary data from the database
Do what ever processing you need to do
Echo out the HTML
get_option("vic_user_id");
...coding magic...
echo $HTMLCode;

This is Really Quite Easy Announcing the Victoria Wordcamp Plugin! Get it at : http://www.jrichards.ca/labs/victoria-wordcamp.zip

Thank You! Photo Credits: - ducks.jpg by andyp uk - sharing.jpg by jonathan mcintosh - symbiotic.jpg by Picture Taker 2 - easy.jpg by Jason Gulledge

Widgets: Making Your Site Great and Letting Others Help - WordCamp Victoria

by Jeff Richards on Nov 16, 2009

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

1 Embed 27

Statistics

Widgets: Making Your Site Great and Letting Others Help - WordCamp Victoria — Presentation Transcript