August 7, 2008
Extension of the week: Widgetbox
coreyg @ 9:06 am
The extension I am focusing on this week is the Widgetbox extension. Widgetbox is a directory of 
over 70,000 widgets that can be added to websites. With the MindTouch Deki Widgetbox extension you can easily add a widget to a Deki page.
To get started, install the Widgetbox extension.
After the installation is complete search for your favorite widget at Widgetbox. Once you have found the widget that you want to add to MindTouch Deki, click the Get Widget button and copy the embed code. Within the embed code there is a url for the application that looks like this:
http://widgetserver.com/syndication/subscriber/InsertWidget.js?appId=
9cb5377d-ed7b-4ebc-abf4-40f2df815711
The only portion of the embed code you need to worry about is the appID provided within the url. Copy the appID (shown above in red) and paste it into the MindTouch Deki Extension dialog.
The inserted code will look like this in your Deki page:
{{ widgetbox.Widget{id: "9baa5602-ad28-4ac8-ab94-af861d6defd8"} }}
This will then embed the widget in your Deki page and will display as follows:
If you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment or contact us.
I don’t understand the purpose of the Widgets Extension. I’ve tried to use it and it makes adding a Widget to a Wiki page more work than just cutting and pasting the Flash or Javascript code from WidgetBox. Whyn not just cut and paste the code into the wiki page?
There is no listing of Widget numbers at the WidgetBox website and you need to select the code and cut the WidgetBox widget number from the code to paste it into the extension. I tried to use the MindTouch Deki Extension dialog and it did not paste the number correctly into the wiki page.
Why add a feature you do not need and creates more work? Just because you can?
Comment by Aurora — August 8, 2008 @ 4:33 pm
Aurora,
While on the surface this does seem like more work to use the extension method as opposed to pasting the code into the editor, there are a couple of benefits that I’m sure you’ll appreciate:
1) Ease - Although it may take a few extra steps in the beginning, you can easily re-purpose a widget through out the site with one line of code.
2) Creating dynamic pages/Mashups - The MindTouch Deki platform was developed to encourage pulling in data from external systems/applications and exposing them through a wiki page so that it is easy to consume. This methodology is tied into the way we present extensions so that you can easily throw together a dynamic page without having to sort through hundreds of lines of copy and pasted code. This makes it easier for the end user.
One thing I do agree with you on is that if the ID code was presented on WidgetBox’s site it would be easier to insert into the MindTouch Deki extension. This is something that we are in the process of following up on with Widgetbox to see if we can make this easier.
If you have any other comments/questions please feel free to post them in the forums or contact us directly: http://wiki.mindtouch.com/support
Thank you for your feedback.
Comment by coreyg — August 10, 2008 @ 9:59 am
Abstracting this in DekiScript has very little to do with making it easier for the user. This is about enabling mashups and security. Steve or Roy can elaborate more on this.
Comment by Aaron Fulkerson — August 11, 2008 @ 8:28 am
If you allow embedding JavaScript directly on your Deki site, then the WidgeBox extension isn’t useful since, as you pointed out, it’s easier to just copy paste the code. However, if you want to let your users embed widgets, but at the same time, you don’t want them to embed random JavaScript snippets, then you really don’t have a choice. So, extension combines versatility and security. The same also applies to the Google Gadget extension. Hope that clarifies the use case. Cheers!
Comment by Steve Bjorg — August 11, 2008 @ 9:00 am