Chapter 6. Building On
Widgets provide a way to extend and customize the core functionality of Sakai OAE. Some widgets are designed to appear on individual’s dashboards, providing access to popular content or to information from beyond OAE. Other widgets are for inclusion in groups, courses, and projects, or on an individual page. Some special widgets are embedded within the framework, like the welcome widget modified in Change the Landing Page.
A widget library collects contributions from schools, organizations, and individuals. It’s still a little sparse, but that’s kind of the point. The OAE project is building the infrastructure. Widgets are all the little corners of functionality that the core team hasn’t thought of. Let’s look at three widgets to give you a flavor.
To install a widget first unzip, build, and configure the frontend OAE code as for Skinning in Chapter 4. Widget installation requires only customizations to the /devwidgets space, so if the skin is unchanging there’s no need to configure a File System Resource for /dev, only one for /devwidgets.
A Very Simple Dashboard Widget: JISC Content Browser
The JISC is a UK organization supporting the use of digitial technology in higher education. The JISC Content browser widget pulls a JISC resident widget into the OAE environment, making it easy to discover content available through the JISC. Almost no code is executed within the OAE environment.
Connect to the Widget Library at http://oae-widgets.sakaiproject.org and enter ...
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