Widget - Development

How to create a Widget?

In order to create a widget please follow these steps:

1. Create a new file named "example_widget.php" in "clancms/widgets/" where "example" is the name of the widget. Here is the basic framework for the widget:

<?php

if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');  

class Example_widget extends Widget { 

    /** 
     * Constructor 
     * 
     */ 
    function Example_widget() 
    { 
        // Call the Widget constructor 
        parent::Widget(); 
         
        // Create a instance to CI 
        $CI =& get_instance(); 
    } 
     
    function index() 
    { 
        // Load the example view 
        $this->CI->load->view(THEME . 'widgets/example'); 
    } 
     
} 
     
/* End of file example_widget.php */ 
/* Location: ./clancms/widgets/example_widget.php */
				
?>

2. Create a template in "clancms/views/themes/YOUR_THEME/widgets" folder named "example.php"
3. To use the widget you need to load it wherever you want it to be used. Here is how to load the widget:

<?php

$this->load->widget('example');
				
?>

4. Your widget should now be loaded and ready to use!

How to pass data from the widget to the template?

The whole point of a widget is to pass data easily from our database to the template. Let's say we wanted to grab the latest 3 news articles from the database and pass them to the template. To do this we would have to do the following:

<?php

// Load the Articles model
$this->CI->load->model('Articles_model', 'articles');
		
// Retrieve the articles
$articles = $this->CI->articles->get_articles(3);
		
// Create a reference to articles
$this->data->articles =& $articles;
		
// Load the articles widget view
$this->CI->load->view(THEME . 'widgets/articles', $this->data);
		
?>

Now the array articles will be available in the articles widget template and can be easily displayed via a foreach loop:

<?php

<?php if($articles): ?>
	<ul id="ticker">
	<?php foreach($articles as $article): ?>
		<li><?php echo $article->article_title; ?> - <?php echo anchor('articles/view/' . $article->article_slug, 'View Article', array('class' => 'yellow')); ?></li>
	<?php endforeach; ?>
	</ul>
<?php else: ?>
	There are currently no articles
<?php endif; ?>

?>