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Configuring Widgets

Why should you care about widget configuration and Parameters?

  • Are your widgets designed to be customizable (such as with URL arguments)?
  • Do you want your widgets to be customizable by end users "in the wild"?
  • Do you want to know which configurations are most popular for your widget?
The Clearspring platform's configuration mechanism can handle this all for you.

 

For example, let's look at two widgets; this one:

and this one:

These two widgets are actually two instances of the same widget, they just have a different value for a configuration parameter that determines which player to highlight. This kind of flexibility is an obvious way to reuse widget code and capabilities, and you'll see the same idea in most of the media player widgets (where a parameter or set of parameters controls which media assets to play), to control color schemes for all kinds of widgets, and lots more.

Support for configuration parameters like these, is a fundamental feature of the Clearspring platform.

The Clearspring Approach

Widget developers working outside of our platform will usually manage this configuration by including the parameters and their values in the code that is embedded across the web. These values are passed to your server, which renders the widget appropriately. For example, you might use URLs in your embedded code like this: 
...
http://www.mysite.com/widget?param1=val1&param2=val2
...
Or for Flash widgets, you might be using FlashVars like this: 
<object ...>
    <param name="allowScriptAccess"       value="sameDomain" />
<param name="movie" value="mywidget.swf" />
<param name="flashvars" value="param1=val1&param2=val2=Three">
...
</object>
This works ok for the basic cases, but the trick is that this code that you and your users are embedding across the web is highly inflexible -- you can't change these values once the code is out there. Further, it really limits viral sharing -- another user can't realistically change this configuration without going back to your site and getting their own, customized widget.

 

Telling the Clearspring platform about the details of your configuration parameters will enable the Container’s Get and Share menu to prompt users to customize their new placement from inside the widget. If the user leaves their email address, we’ll even send them a password so they can come back and make changes later. The settings are stored on our server so you don’t get stuck with old parameters littered all over Myspace embed tags. This also lets us report to you which of your configurations are most popular. so you can optimize your widget.

As you would expect, you get a good deal of control over exactly how this all works. Parameters may be set up so that only you as the widget publisher can change them, or they may be configured so that users can change them when sharing widgets amongst each other. Parameters apply to Flash as well as HTML/Javascript widgets, and are distributed completely at runtime.

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