There was a ton of buzz surrounding the first release of the Widget Suite for DotNetNuke. Like most open source projects the buzz – while always appreciated – was very unexpected. It led to the addition of two project team members in just a couple of days!
New Project Contributors
I cannot thank the Widget Suite team enough for their passion and helping to get the latest release of the project out the door so quickly. I was (not surprisingly) the bottle neck in this release.
Mark Allan
You probably would know Mark Allan best as MarkXA, the person behind the wildly popular menu provider, the DDRmenu (a.k.a., DNNGarden). I’d give him a much better introduction, but I’d hope his reputation would precede him at this point – in a GOOD way, of course. I think it’s safe to say that Mark did the majority of the work in this release.
Armand Datema
Armand goes by nokiko online and one of the minds behind SchwingSoft, and like Mark, he is very active in his contributions to the community. He was no slouch to this project either. He contributed a new widget in just a day or so.
Thank you again to these very generous DotNetNuke community members!
Version 01.01.00 Release
Initially, this release was scoped to be much smaller in terms of the number of updates and features, but everyone involved were simply too excited and tackle as much as possible immediately!
The previous version of the Widget Suite had 3 widgets to choose from. We now have 7 widgets for you to use! There were some enhancements to the External Links widget.
Also, I decided to include a little-known JavaScript debugging feature as a proof of concept in the Social Bookmarks and Icon Switcher widgets. Simply add a “debug” parameter in the widget when declaring it, and set its value to “true” to check it out.
The Icon Switcher is pretty cool, because it allows you to replace the default icon set without making any core code changes. But since I wanted to have an example icon set to include with it, it forced me to re-evaluate how the extension packaging was done.
There are now 4 different download packages for you to choose from. Two allow you to choose if you want to include the example icon set, and the other two allow you to choose if you want a better performing, compressed version of the widget scripts instead of the debug version.
Here is a complete list of the updates that were made in this release:
At this point, I hope you’re ready to check out the suite of widget on your own. Just remember to give the project a review. Any support will be done through the discussion area or issue tracker for the project.