What are widgets?

Widgets, in the case of b2evolution, are basically skin tag plugins, like the weather plugin; ministats plugin; calendar plugin; and all the others that you normally have floating around in your sidebar. Currently if you want to rearrange the order in your sidebar, or add a new skintag plugin, you have to crack open your skins _main.php and manually add a snippet of code wherever you want the results to be shown.

This method of course has a couple of flaws when it comes to reality. The main flaw it has is that it requires a slight knowledge of php, not a lot but often it's enough to trip up the basic user. The other main flaw is that it requires the ability to be able to ftp files to the server. In a multi blogger environment I'd be very surprised if more than a couple of chosen users had ftp access at all.

This is where widgets come in. From version 2.0 skintag plugins have become Widgets and they work in a very different way, although they're still plugins at heart and can still be added to a skin in the old school way. With widgets, and an appropriate skin that uses them, you no longer need to edit your template to change the order, or even to add new ones, or delete ones you no longer use. Now you can do all that from admin. With a few clicks of your mouse button you're able to add and remove widgets, change their order of appearance, and even choose where they appear in your skin.

The advantages of widgets

The advantages to the basic user are obviously huge, they no longer need to know any php, they don't need ftp access, they don't even have to know what a parameter is. All they need to do is wander over to the admin area for their blog and click buttons, how simple is that! There's also other advantages, skin designers no longer need to think about every possible plugin that might get installed. It's all taken care of for them so all they need to do is to add "containers" to their skin, which is basically a place holder for widgets to fill. Widget designers no longer need to say "crack open your skins _main.php and paste this code snippet wherever you want the answer to appear", which should save a fair few support requests and crashed blogs.

It all sounds to good to be true huh? Simple enough for even the basic users to be able to use, convenient for skin designers who no longer have to worry about what plugins should go where and in which order, and great for blog admins who no longer have to give out ftp accounts to users so they can change their skin.

The problem with core widgets

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the core widgets, as long as you want to use their default output. A prime example is the rss widget which has a hard coded title, part of which is that groovy little orange icon. Unfortunately that groovy little icon has a white background instead of a transparent one which meant it looked bloody awful on a pink skin I was playing with ( don't worry, I won't assult your eyeballs by linking to it ;) ). Now for me that's not a huge problem, I have CVS access so I can convert the background to transparent and upload it to the core for all future versions.

The problem is, I don't actually want the icon in the title for my skin. In this instance, because the title is hard coded, I'd now have to hack a core file to remove the icon, ohhh, and it'd be removed for all of the skins. Now, I've not wandered through all of the core plugins to see if they're equally hard coded, but lets pretend they're not. Lets imagine that I could call the rss widget in my skins _main.php in the old school way, and pass it the title that I want it to use. Great, now I can remove the icon for just the skin(s) I want, so no problem right? ........ Wrong. The moment you put a skintag call in instead of using it as a widget you lose the ability to put it where you want in your sidebar, unless you put all of the widgets in as skintag calls, in the order that you want them. Which kind of defeats the purpose of having widgets in the first place, so now were back to square one :-/

The only real solution to this is to go through the code for all of the core widgets and to convert all of the hard coded values into settings which can be changed on a per blog basis. This would at least allow the user to change the values to something that suits their needs. Although it would also be nice to have widget settings on a per skin basis, this would probably be overkill ;)

Summary

I think users and admins are going to love widgets. For the user they get far more control of how their blog looks without having to worry about how to add it to a skin without breaking the skin. The admin advantage is even clearer, no longer do they have to consider either giving users an ftp account so they can alter their own skin, or making the changes for the user, or just telling them "tough shit, that's the way the skin looks". The other bonus for them is they no longer need to change every skin just to install a new plugin.

From the skin designers point of view, there's no longer the need to either try and code for every plugin out there, and ones that might be out there in the future, or if they're anything like me, code for all the plugins I use and sod the rest ;) Now they can create a skin that has the basic skintag parameters, and put a container wherever a user *might* like to have a widget .... hell, they could add one to each and every <div> and give the user complete freedom of choice.

For widget developers it's just made the documentation easier, "click install" is pretty simple to explain, and, if they use parameters well enough they should also be able to cover any skin / situation. Another bonus will be the reduction of "I tried to install the 'foo' plugin, but when I added the php to my skin it didn't work / looked wierd / went tits up / some other reason" support questions to answer.

All in all I think that widgets, like many other things in 2.0, are a great step forward for every part of the user base, from the basic user, to blog admins, to skin designers to plugin developers..... mind you, that's probably why it's version 2.0 and not 1.11 huh? ;)

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Now that I've encouraged my search cloud to filter out most of the myspace muppet search terms that I get hit with it's become a far more interesting read! Not that it needed much encouraging, it was practically begging me to put it out of it's misery.

• your country needs you - if it can survive blair it probably does
• un block sites - ok
• optomistic quotes - urm, does this mean you're looking for cheap insurance?
• unknown proxies - if it was unknown how would google know about it?
• my space un blocker - it's called age
• tit wankers - thank you for entertaining me
• "muathe.com" doesn't work - no, he spams
• un block pages - sure, just send me all your login details, your bank account number ..... actually, forget that, you're probably one of the muppets that filled in my form
• summary the eagle has landed - yay :D
• babbles games - I really should find out what this game is
• ttfn summary - it means "bye" then you leave
• m y s p a c e u n b l o c k e r - You really win muppet of the year, do you know how many sites there are with the letters "A B C E K L M N O P R S U Y" in the content?
• pond pumps yabba - I don't sell them, but my mate does
• link words - yay, next comes a complete sentence :D
• un blocker - try a plunger
• un block my space - no
• platform beds uk - platforms sleep!!!!!
• potting shed pics - I'll post some as soon as Ash visits the field ;)
• un block un block - urm, why would unblocked be blocked?
• "scorched earth" band scorchio - must be a famous group, cos I've never heard of them
• clock quotes - I can sell you a nice grandfather for £3,000 ..... he even comes with a clock
• katspells - normally a cat spells ripped wallpaper, flattened plants, shit all over the place, and fleas :|
• potting sheds - the best bet is to pick a pot that's bigger than the shed, otherwise it'll never grow
• innervisions - lsd ;)
• yabba flowers pond pumps - I have a pond pump plant?
• unknown web proxies - try 127.0.0.d0h
• un block - anything in particular?
• fitting kitchens - work best when they meet the walls
• potting shed - same as potting sheds but you only need one pot
• glass stones - whilst they look great don't try and make an axe out of one
• dying hair - red is the way forward
• bimble - *salutes* I do my best :D
• filter proxies - use a sieve
• silly quotes - EdB said "this sucks" and I will.
• un blocking sites - first pay for your own connection, computer, electricity, house ....
• bimboland - welcome to the right place ;)
• b2evo $blog->disp( 'pingback_url', 'raw' ) - WOW, someone who knows how to use a search engine :D if you still need help then just holler ;)
• url un block - any url in particular?
• un block all websites - if all websites are blocked then maybe you forgot to power up your modem?
• i am lucifer - yeah yeah

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This is a special message to all the people out there who're still looking for a way to access myspace from "my school" ....... I've tried telling you that you'll end up as some spammers bitch if you use a proxy but I still get a plethora of comments asking me how to unlock it.

So, I've decided that there's only one way to attempt to solve this situation. If you're trying to unlock myspace then just use the form below to login and I'll fulfil your wish :D

*note* To any teachers out there that are considering adding my blog to their filters, you might like to fill in the form and press submit before you jump to that conclusion, use a bogus u/p ;)

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*edit* - comments are now fixed ;)

Yaaaaaaaay the 2007 bimbling season has begun, at last I have the opportunity to break out my shiny new shorts, bring on the sun and lets plant some dahlias. :D

Everything started a tad late this year as I spent a month being a smidge on the blind side of sighted, which doesn't help when you need to bimble around behind the trusty old rotavator. It got even worse because when I could finally see the only thing in sight were grey bloody clouds, gotta love England. Anyway, the weather finally realised that the sun was meant to be visible, what with it being almost June, and the clouds scurried off for long enough to allow us to put in a couple of weeks of power bimbling.

We'd had a tad of a windy winter this year and due to the fact that an unnamed blonde bimbo forgot to reattach a couple of crucial brackets to a few pieces of wood we lost one end of the big greenhouse ...... well, we didn't exactly lose it, although we did lose the roof, it was just ripped apart and dumped on the flower beds. We also lost the roof off the center section of the same greenhouse, due to the same winds, but this time it wasn't the bimbos fault ...... ah well, we wanted to replace them this year anyway, and it saves us from having to remove them manually.

As always the season began by rotavating the main greenhouse, a task that normally takes a week and a bit all by itself. This year we pulled out all of the stops and got it done in just under 4 days, trust me when I say that it was hot & sweaty and approached being called hard work 88| ..... yeah yeah, pick yourselves off the floor, I promise not to swear again in this post ...... due to the lack off roofs the majority of the big greenhouse was knee deep in weeds, thankfully Barry had the task off clearing them away, and I had the pleasure of using a flame thrower to kill any seeds that were left behind.

In an attempt to catch up with lost time we decided that we'd plant up over the weekend, not only because the dahlias were screaming to be let out of their pots, but because it's far easier to look after them once they're slapped in the ground. So, roll on Saturday, throw on a new pair of shorts ...... did I mention that I have several new pairs of shorts? ...... and lets start planting. Five hours of extreme power bimbling later we'd marked up 10 of the 12 beds and I'd watched as Barry hammered over 400 stakes in the ground ...... somebody has to supervise huh? ...... and we had all 10 of the beds planted up, damn they look good when they're full of plants :D ...... as you can imagine I had a fair few beers to celebrate.

By the second week we were pretty much back on schedule, so we were able to take things at a smidge of an easier pace. We finished off the last two beds in the main greenhouse, staked them up and planted them, and then wandered over to the little greenhouse to get that one ready for planting as well ...... another hundred and a bit stakes for Barry to vent any pent up frustrations by hammering them into the ground and a couple of hours of planting later and we had that one resembling a real greenhouse full of flowers as well.

The last bit off the week was spent taking the roof off the little greenhouse and bringing home the odd spare flower or two for the Mighty V ...... you should have seen the smile on her face when she came home to well over 400 spare plants and the odd bag of chicken shit for her own garden ..... instant "in good books" material, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants some instant karma ;) Of course this meant I hardly got to see her for the next few days as she wandered around donating dahlias to all the neighbours who'd been waiting with bated breath for there annual arrival, and then started planting all of her favourite ones in our own little patch of soil.

During the odd spare moments from planting up the greenhouses we also managed to get our own little corner of the field cleared and rotavated and we spent a sunny afternoon planting all the veg that had been sat in our tiny lil greenhouse waiting for us. Damn they're gonna taste good when we get to eat them. Due to the fact that we had a tad more time to plan we've got some great stuff planted and should be eating our own food within weeks. We've also planted some more veg in our tiny little back garden ...... and in a few pots ..... and we even have some strawberries in one of the hanging baskets.

Anyway, the sun's made an appearance so it's time for me to throw my shorts on again and go and give all of the dahlias a tad of water whilst I water myself with the odd beer and soak up some rays ...... it's a hard life, but somebody's got to do it huh Gary?
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Another month, another bunch of spamming wankers that can't tell the difference between 403 and 200, maybe they should go back to school and learn basic algebra? .... Mind you, all the school kids seem to want to unblock myspace nowadays, so maybe the lack of intelligence is systemic?

As always there's a new muppet that's one brick short of a load when it comes to intelligence, at least they've found something that they excel at ...... if only they awarded trophies for stupidity, they'd have 1,488 trophies engraved with "I was told to shove it up my arse" :|

In total this month there were 6,863 contestants who valiantly tried 26,842 times to work out what "403 your shit is not wanted" means ..... unsurprisingly they all failed .... sorry guys, but at least you have a new trophy for your overflowing cabinet huh? The good news is that they make anyone trying to access myspace from school look like a bloody genius, so anybody out their trying to bypass their schools myspace filter...... pat yerself on the back and repeat after me "I may have an IQ smaller than my shoe size, but at least I'm not a spammer" :D

As well as picking on the tits that try to comment spam me I also decided to pick on all the referrer spam that I get ... no surprises that these guys share the same IQ level as the normal "buy your viagra from Canada" arses, so far, out of 4,000+ attempts ( not including the half dozen false positives ), they've also been told that spam is a suppository in disguise.... , maybe I should add a new results table just for them?

Anyway, it's time I wandered off and left all y'all in peace again ;)
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