I had a brief conversation about this with Ken today and he suggested I post it here. This is just the seed of a module definition; comments and refinements are invited.
We all need to make little chunks of content -- generally headlines and links -- available to other sites. RSS is one way to do that, but Javascript "widgets" are another way, and potentially a better solution in some cases.
Last week I was in Los Angeles at a seminar organized by the Knight New Media Center, involving the senior print and online editors from 10 major U.S. newspapers. I was struck by how they latched onto the idea of widgets ... and keep in mind that half of this group was not particularly technoliterate. (Their own description was "functional illiteracy about technology.") So you can expect to see a significant upswing in the use of widgets on news websites.
What I'm imagining is a module that emits Javascript-wrapped linksets. In its simplest form it could be just a Drupal block wrapped in Javascript document.write() calls.
A more sophisticated approach would be to hook into Views, allowing arbitrary definitions, so I'm crossposting this to that group.
The most important target would be simple Javascript widgets to be embedded in third-party websites. But it might also be possible to support Yahoo! widgets, Konfabulator, Mac OS X Dashboard, et cetera.
If some/all of this already exists I'd like to know about it.
Thoughts?
Comments
It's not far off from a few things we do now
We use javascript and rss to feed a bunch of content back and forth between our drupal servers and other servers, and to add dynamic elements to static pages, like our home page RSS feeds and Top Jobs feeds. Encapsulating other content into 'widgets' and offering them up is pretty simple from a technology standpoint. The greater challenge would be tracking use of those widgets on other sites and serving ads into widgets.
Widgets and mysite
It'd also be nice to see these widgets incorporated into the mysite module (which I believe Ken wrote/maintains?) -- this way, a site could have a certain number of these widgets available, and users could drop them into their personal homepage.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Widgets
Bill, that seems a little far off the scope of the MySite project to me. I think this is more suitable for the Views module, since Views already tracks the creation and export of each view. It seemed to me that VIews already had the infrastructure to support this feature.
If we implemented it in MySite, the question would be: who can create the JavaScript widgets? I suppose that's an obvious "whoever has permissions" question. Anyone with permissions could request a JS widget for any MySite page content.
On the admin side, we could have a page that showed all active MySite content and allows for JS export of that content.
I think it's possible, but its a large change in scope. Maybe Merlin is listening in to talk about Views.
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http://ken.therickards.com/
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http://ken.therickards.com/