The concept of Widgets in DotNetNuke was introduced back in 2009 and, as I suspected, has never caught on. At least in my experience, I haven't seen anyone using them and I have seen a good case really to start using them because it's just as easy to just include a jQuery plugin without using widgets.

As I work to improve site performance in my DNN sites and maximize the benefit of the Client Resource Management API, I find myself having to go into every site and uncheck the "Enable Skin Widgets" checkbox in Site Settings -> Appearance as nothing we use makes any use of widgets so it's just an extra unnecessary Javascript include. With their being 700,000 DNN sites out there, I would guess the vast majority of them are including but not using initWidgets.js.

It seems like it's time to phase it out, add it to a different script, or to at least use the proper method to register it so it can be wrapped into the ClientResourceManagement handled files.

Thoughts?

I was one of the people that actually worked on these things and they had there uses. You could use these in your skins and have users use these scripts not by putting js calls in the editors but by putting in the widget tags to call the javascript with the data needed ) so this would not be deleted by the editor

However it could have been way better integrated. I am a big fan of the shortcode feature in wordpress where you can create all kind of data with tag like replacement and this could have been great to actually include the scripts better in the editor.

There was something in the dnnwidgets page that has a generator like this but if this would have been integrated better it could be more widely adopted.  

But I hardly use it anymore as well I just tell people to put the jsdcall to fire up there carousel in liek the module footer, works great as well

Armand Datema

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