Edwin Brown

Widget Programming

Introduction
This is intended for reasonably experienced PHP programmers with some experience in vBulletin programming. You should have at least a basic understand of the vB templating system and phrasing. If you don’t, I strongly recommend you do some homework before trying to program a widget. I will use as an example the static html widget.

It's very early to be writing this, I know. I can't say exactly when alpha testing will start on ...

I know it's hard to visualize the widgets when you can't see either what they look like or how you administer them. I've been holding off putting up screen shots, because none of the pages have been styled. The admin pages probably won't change much if at all, but the user-facing changes are getting a thorough facelift, both visually and in terms of the styling and templating. So please don't comment on how ugly the CMS page is. We know, and we've got all available hands working on it. But the screen ...

We've been doing a lot of work with widgets, and I have something that is close to the final list that will ship with vB 4.0. It's always possible something could change, but it looks right now like we have.

1. Static HTML: This allows you to enter any static html. That means you can put a remote page in an i-frame, or an image, or a google gadget, or a lot of other things.
2. Static BB Code: This gives you the BBCode editor and lets you put the results into a widget.
3. My Friends: You

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I'm one of the developers here at VBulletin, and I've recently been building some widgets that are intended to be included with vB4. We're still cleaning up the editor interface, but what I'm showing here should be reasonably close to what we deliver.

I've done three widgets. These are

• static html. I've been testing with google gadgets, so you can encapsulate some significant functionality.
• rss feed. I've tested with atom v2 and rss v2. Other versions should work but I

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