What Confuses you about Magento Widgets API?

Question

This is a little vague, but I hope I'm allowed.

I'd like to get a feel for what the Magento developer community thinks of the Widgets API. Are they clear or confusing, useful or useless. The more detail the better. Do you use the feature? If not, why not? What don't you understand about the feature? etc. etc.

When I say Widgets, I'm referring the programatic APIs specific to the feature.

Answer 1

Yeah its definitely something we have wanted to take more of a look at but we haven't set any budget aside to actually investigate. I would love to create some little widgets that we could utilize for each client instead of having to create blocks that the client then has to pass data to inside of a static block. I looked into it about a year ago and just haven't looked back.

The funny thing is now there are a lot of widgets out there in the community, yet you still don't hear anything about them. I guess we just need more articles about them, which I am sure after you write one, we will all get it :). Basically people don't have time with how busy they are probably to investigate the Widget API fully enough to utilize it. And since there isn't a lot of knowledge base information about it, you don't see a lot of people using them.

Answer 2

I as a developer understand the usefulness of this API and it is not harder to use than any other thing in Magento. I have used it a lot cause I can understand the feature.

But me as the person who has to explain what is a widget or why I made something to be a widget, how should a user or designer use it, why there is a block and a widget side by side and what's the difference. Then I tend to think that this is a total disaster and we should have only widgets or only blocks or one common name and just some type/attribute/value that distinguish static and dynamic version of widgets so I could say : "Hey this block/widget you can drag or include wherever you like in your site and this one you can't"

Answer 3

I was excited about the widget feature when it came out. There is decent documentation available, and I was quickly able to code my own simple widgets. Since then, however, I never actually used widgets in my projects. I have never really understood when to use widgets, and I almost forgot about them.

I feel like we need articles and examples to show the usefulness of widgets. I need widgets to pop up in my head when a client asks for features that can be solved using widgets. Recently, a client wanted to have some text in the footer on the home page. I created a static block and declared it in layout/local.xml. With widgets, this could all have been done from the backend.