Whoa…  I cannot express to you enough – how much of a whirlwind the last few weeks have been for the Widget Suite for DotNetNuke project.  Many late nights have been spent going into this release.  Over this time, we’ve been tweaking and building widgets, automating the widget packaging process, adjusting the scope of the next and future releases, and most of all – releasing and managing a brand-spanking-new website!  All that has led to today’s announcement of the much anticipated version 01.03.00 release.

Project Contributors

Before I introduce the really fun stuff, I must sit back for a moment and publicly thank the two main people behind this release of the project:  Armand Datema, and Mark Allan.  They have been instrumental in every way to helping to make this project valuable for all of you.  Please visit their respective websites and give them thanks for all of their hard work – hard work that you don’t have to spend a penny to see value in.

Release Highlights

There are many new things that revolve around this release, but two new features really do highlight some of the impact a skin widget can have on your DNN website.  First, is the Facebook widget.  As evident throughout much of the Widget Suite website, this widget makes it very easy for you to add Facebook social features to your DNN site.  ALL of those features are supported in this single widget!

That widget alone is worth the price of the admission…  But there’s another widget that appears to be the life of the party for this release.  Armand Datema is the mind behind the Store Widget.  He gave tweeted a teaser video showing how this widget worked, and it caused quite a bit of buzz online!  It goes without saying that this widget really put our feet to the fire to hurry up and get this release out the door.

Enter the Store Widget…

This widget allows you to create and manage a store (free up to 100 products) on the ecwid website, and then literally add a single line of code to your Page Settings to enable the skin widget to work.  (You have to already have the widget in your site.)  The result is that you instantly have a very usable AJAX-ified e-commerce experience on your DotNetNuke website!

Don’t believe me?  Check out the beta video, or see the demo yourself on the Store Widget page.  It’s nothing short of amazing!!!

Runner Ups…

There were many other additions to this release, including:

• New Widget: Basic Settings Widget – Allows you to remove a lot of the advanced settings from the UI in DNN content editor and admin views.
• New Widget: Popeye Lightbox – Allows you to create an advanced image gallery experience.
• New Widget: SyntaxHighlighter – Enables you to have your code properly formatted on your site.  (Also implemented in the most recent DNN Blog release.)
• New Widget: Include Script – Allows you to very easily include a JavaScript file from nearly any location on the web.
• New Widget: Include jQueryUI – Makes it easy for you to include the jQueryUI framework and CSS themes.
• New Widget: Facebook – Enables you to be able to include any of the available social features from the Facebook API on your site.
• New Widget: Store – Provides a rich user experience-based shopping experience on your DNN site using AJAX.

As you can see, there were 7 new widgets added to the Widget Suite, bringing the total number of skin widgets up to 19 widgets in the suite!  This is a ton of functionality in a single download.

WARNING:  If you’re one of the 6 people that downloaded the 01.03.00 release, please download the latest Widget Suite release ASAP. This release addresses a bug in a few of the Facebook social plugins.

This blog entry is cross-posted from my personal blog site.