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Telligent approaches widgets from the concept of the Widget Studio - an environment in which you can completely customize any aspect of our widgets using upgrade-safe Platform APIs. An administrator can replace all instances of an existing widget with a custom widget from the Control Panel.
What widgets are
Widgets are lightweight, reusable user interface (UI) elements. Within Telligent Community Server, widgets are used for all of the user interface - from a menu to a wiki posts. Adding or removing widget(s) help you control the user experience. An admin can also specify what context(s) a widget is available for (in the Control Panel). The contexts are actually themes (e.g., the site theme, the group theme, the blog theme, dashboard themes).
You can find a documentation list of factory default widgets here. Each widget name on the document links to a description and configuration article for the widget.
Widget contexts
As we mentioned above, widgets are available to be used in different themes. The widgets you can use in each context is decided in the Control Panel Manage Widgets page. About the widget themes:
- Dashboard - Home page for each community member. (By default each individual community member can customize it.)
- Group pages - Home page for a group and all its application pages (like forums, wikis, and media galleries) except for blogs. (By default admins and group owners can customize it.)
- Blog pages - Home page for a group blog application. (By default admins, group owners, and blog owners can customize it.)
- Site pages - All other pages throughout your community including site home page, log in/out page, error pages, etc. (These are only customizable by an administrator.)
Some widgets are designed to be used only in very specific areas and, when used on pages they are not designed for, may cause your page to display incorrectly. An administrator can fix this problem by switching into Edit Page mode by including the Page-EditMode=True query string parameter on the URL for the page (for example, http://localhost/CS/publicopen1/subpublicopena/b/create.aspx?Page-EditMode=True).
Custom coding widgets
All widgets included with Community Server are completely customizable. For information about this, consult the Developer documentation.