In my last post I mentioned widgets. Today I’d like to write a bit more about what they will be in the context of ZenMagick.

Without beeing to much affected by other applications use of widgets (I’ve never used a WordPress widget, for example), my idea of a widget is that of a self contained piece UI and code.

Widgets can be displayed using a simple method render(). Other than that widgets should take care of themselves as much as possible. Of course, this is not always possible, however, things should kept as simple as possible to make it easier in the future to get them even more autark.

The only type of widgets that I’ve checked in so far are form widgets. One of the benefits so far is that plugins now can use checkboxes for on/off yes/no plugin options – something that I’ve missed a bit so far.

The next type of widget that I am thinking about are pure UI elements. To get started I hope to convert the admin category tree function zm_catalog_tree(), zm_product_resultlist() and the still to be finished product picker to widget classes.