Widgetkit is getting bigger
Widgetkit has been around for 6 weeks now and during this time a lot has happened. First we like to thank everyone who tried the Widgetkit betas and has sent us feedback. We really appreciate it! Until today, we have released 5 betas including bugfixes, optimizations and new widgets. Here are some notable features we've added so far: translations, RTL support, editor support for Joomla's TinyMCE and JCE, caption support for slideshows and HTML5 video playback in the lightbox. With the upcoming release of Joomla 1.7 on 19. July 2011, we've also updated Widgetkit to support the latest 1.7 version as well. This makes Widgetkit work perfectly on Joomla 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 and the latest WordPress 3.2. Here is an overview of all the new widgets we've added since the first beta release:
Gallery
The gallery widget provides a great way to create an image gallery with multiple images on your website. With the built in directory browser you can easily add or remove image source directories and create your individual gallery in no time. To change the gallery's overall appearance we've added two new styles with BETA5, wall and slider, to current slideshow style. The wall style allows you to create image and polaroid walls with a lightbox and spotlight effect. The slider style puts the images next to each other and shows them fullsize on mouse hover with a sliding effect. Just pick your favorite style and everything else is done automatically in the background for you like image resizing and caching. It has never been that easy to create an awesome looking gallery!
Map
The map widget lets you create maps with multiple locations and markers. Powered by the latest Google Maps API you can change various settings to create a map which perfectly fits into your website. The new style settings allow you to change overall map colors and adopt your site colors to the map. We promise that you'll love this one!
Accordion
The accordion widget creates a group of items using a smooth sliding effect when selecting an item to display its content. We added a simple and clean style to make the accordion easily match to a broad range of websites.
Media Player
We unveiled the media player already in BETA4 which lets you playback video and audio files directly in your website content. Embedding videos is simply done through HTML5 <video /> element which is also widely supported on mobile devices like iPhones, iPads or Android phones and tablets. You also don't need to worry about older browsers, because it has a flash fallback for all who don't support these HTML5 elements. You can even play your .mp3 files by using the new <audio /> element. Great, isn't it?
ZOO Integration
Widgetkit and ZOO are now able to communicate! This has been one of the most requested features, and we are glad to deliver it to you now. By using a Joomla plugin you can display any ZOO content within our freshly released widgets like accordion, map and slideshow. Make sure to have the latest ZOO version installed as you'll need it to customize the content that is being displayed.
The workflow is pretty straight forward and should already be known to you, if you've been using the ZOOtools. There is a new button in the Widgetkit dashboard called "Add new (ZOO)". Upon hitting it, you'll be able to choose what content from ZOO to display. By customizing the layouts of the item types you may assign any element you want to be displayed. So enjoy the power of our fresh widgets paired with the comfort and the flexibility of the ZOO.
What's next?
We are still not done yet! We will continue with adding new features to Widgetkit, and we are also working on new widgets and style variations for existing widgets. If you have not tried it yet, make sure to check it out and send us feedback about how it works for you!
