Dynamic themes are themes that evolve according to the time of day. Provided the theme designer has built his theme conscienciously, a visitor to your public page would not see the same theme in the morning, in the afternoon or in the evening.

This can make for some very creative and inventive use of a theme! You can now express the whole spectrum of your personality through your public page’s theme.

How it works

In your themes, all you have to do is create more than one <ConfigMap type=”skin”> and indicate the time the skin must be displayed at. To do so, add the following tag: <Trait name=”TimeOfDay”>1am-2am</Trait> in yout ConfigMap.

You should end up with something like this:

<ConfigMaps>
  <ConfigMap type="skin">
    <Trait name="TimeOfDay">12am-12pm</Trait>
    ...
  </ConfigMap>
  <ConfigMap type="skin">
    <Trait name="TimeOfDay">1pm-12am</Trait>
    ...
  </ConfigMap>
</ConfigMaps>

Make sure that your timestamps cover the whole day. You can make your life easy by having just two themes (12am-12pm and 1pm-12am), or go crazy and make a specific theme for each hour (12am-1am, 1am-2am, etc.)! Don’t be afraid about using too many images: only the currently dispayed image is loaded.

We’re looking forward to improve the syntax. Help us build a better theme format by sending your feedback!

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UWA widgets at work

That’s exactly what happened last month with Kludgets. Kludgets (short for “Klumsy, Lame, Ugly, Dumb, but Good Enough” ) is a new, open-source and multiplatform (Windows and Linux) widget engine, which aim is to become a best-of-breed widget engine, taking inspiration from the best features of other platforms.

As such, its widget format is a clone of the Apple Dashboard’s. And since UWA widgets can be exported to the Dashboard format, it was only a matter of time before the Kudgets developer took advantage of it! As they write in their blog, it only takes a handful of steps to get any UWA widget from Ecosystem to work on this new engine.

We’re really happy to see further proof that the UWA format’s versatility can be once more proven by this open-source project, and we wish it a swift and successful version 1.0!

Now, if they could directly implement the UWA format itself (either using the UWA specification or the LGPLv3 Exposition project), that’d be neat!

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Well, ado there needs to be: let it be known, good people and dearest subscribers, that my time away from the blog has not been in vain, only that I was diverted by other projects which needed my full attention. Even better, the latest of these time-consuming project has even been recently launched: French users of Netvibes can now profit (literally!) from a fully-featured Cashback widget – in the conception of which I had a not-too-small part

Anyway, the Netvibes DevNet blog is now back on tracks, and to make up for the lost time, here are a couple not-so-random facts that popped on our screens during the hiatus, and that we thought you might be interested in. In fact, far from being random, they are both tied to UWA one way or another. Neato!

UWA widget for WordPress!

Now that the major components of UWA have been released as open-source on Netvibes.org (as well as the UWA specification), it was just a matter of time before some talented coder got hold of them to add UWA-capability to a project. Turns out the talent came from none other than François Hodierne,  a former member of the Netvibes team and the man behind the h6e moniker!

The UWA Widgets plugin, which hecreated and released back in January, is a WordPress plugin which lets you add UWA widgets on your WordPress dashboard. Simple as that.

What that means is that you can improve the overly dull defaults blocks of WordPress’ dashboard, by mixingsome fun or useful widgets in.

Installing a widget is very easy, once you have a UWA widget’s source URL. The plugin adds a ‘Manage Widget’ section in the ‘Settings’ menu. Click it, and a quick interface reveals itself: a list of the installed widgets (with a remove button in case you need it), and simple form to add new widget.
Copy-paste the new widget’s source URL in that form, validate, and from now on the dashboard will display it along with the other components. You can edit the widget just as you would on Netvibes or the Apple Dashboard: by clicking the ‘Configure’ button that appears at the top-right of the block…

The WordPress dashboard with the Twitter, i-Metro and Gaping Void UWA widgets

You can get this nifty plugin from the WordPress.org Extend section, or directly from WordPress’ internal plugins installer (if you use WP 2.7+).

Note: the UWA technology relies on the Zend Framework. Hence, François have created a separate Zend Framework plugin for WordPress, which you should install and activate before activating the UWA Widgets plugin.

UWA cheat-sheet in Russian!

Our friends at Rambler.ru, who’s own personnalized startpage uses the Netvibes technology, have been kind enough to make a russian translation of the UWA cheat-sheet, and share it with us. You download it here, as with the English and French version!

If you happen to be interested in translating the cheat-sheet into your own language, don’t hesitate to contact us!

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Busy with improving your experience with UWA, that is! While you might not jump to the eyes, some of our recent efforts have been centered around giving both users and developers a stronger UWA. We did this by working at improving two critical components of a widget developer’s life: the UWA code itself, and its documentation.

Better, Faster, Stronger… and not Harder

For the last few weeks, our developers have been steadily rewiring the internal compilers for most of the supported platforms, bringing the UWA Environment at top speed, and making room for further improvements. This all happened behind the scene, but the upgrade to the compilers (iGoogle, Opera, Apple Dashboard, Live.com, etc.) should improve your every day use of UWA widgets.

Aditionnally, we used these updates to normalize behaviors across the different platforms, and incorporate a bottom status bar to maximize the spread of your widgets. Every newly-exported widget from Ecosystem will feature this bar, which we hope will help your widget reach more people.

See for instance the Web Radio Player widget, as displayed on Apple Dashboard, iGoogle, Opera and with the export tool :

As you can see, they all share the same Share button at the bottom of the widget. This is not in place in the Vista/Live.com export for now.

Also, note that all changes made to UWA are regularly backported to the open-source Exposition Widget Server.

…and easier on the eyes too!

Let’s face it, the DevNet used to be a mess of intertwined pages. That alone was bound to lose the reader’s patience, but the fact that over the years more technologies other than UWA kept being added to the documentation site (REST API, Ecosystem API, Theme format…), made for a much-needed revamping of the homepage, as well as a reorganization of all pages and a trimming of the unneeded ones.

That means a few important changes in the documentation URLs. All the documentation used to be located under http://dev.netvibes.com/doc/, but the coming of non-UWA-related docs urged us to gave each of them its own directory, as it should. There are now 3 mains sub-directories:

• http://dev.netvibes.com/doc/uwa/ : all there is to know about UWA, the Universal Widget API;
• http://dev.netvibes.com/doc/api/ : for some of Netvibes’ other APIs;
• http://dev.netvibes.com/doc/theme/ : for our Theme file format.

All the previously available docs have been moved to their respective directories. This would mean URL breakage, but we paid attention to make sure old URL would automatically redirect to the news ones. That being said, if you stumble upon any remaining ones, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Likewise, some pages of documentation have been deleted, some others created, some renamed for clarity, and most have been rewritten at least in part in order to take into account two years of UWA discussions on the forum. We’re still working on a brand new FAQ as of this typing, but all other page should be clearer yet.

Anyway, as the old song goes: “you have to admit, it’s getting better, a little better all the time”

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UWA developers can now make their widgets social through the powers of the OpenSocial API.

At the moment, we’re still in Public Preview mode – which means that it is not yet available on the main Netvibes site, and instead requires you to open an account in our sandbox site. It will allow you to test a few socials ideas with your widgets, until the official unveiling…

In order to test your OpenSocial-using UWA widgets, simply add the “UWA+OpenSocial” widget from the Essential Widgets list, and put your widget’s URL in its Edit section…

Because OpenSocial has its own website (and follows its own evolution path), our documentation on the subject is quite minimal: just the UWA basics you need to remember, the biggest part of the knowledge being on the OpenSocial site.

—

In addition to making UWA more powerful thanks to OpenSocial, Netvibes is now supporting the Google Gadget format. Again, this is still a Public Preview available only from the sandbox site (through the “Google Gadget” module). We’ll keep you informed on the evolution of that support soon…

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It’s been a long while since we wanted to bring such freedom to the creativity of our users, and in the end we decided to use a theme format that would be compatible with iGoogle’s Theme API. You can already dive in our theme design documentation!

So build away! The file format uses XML, and it’s easy to build a theme, using images and a few simple rules. Once you design is done, put all the files online, and to use the design on a Netvibes page, just call it using this URL: http://www.netvibes.com/?theme=[absolute URL of theme's XML file]

Technical details

These themes are applied on internal theme framework, with some CSS rules that cannot be over-ridden – so you won’t be able to move the tabs to the left column for now, for instance – but you can use the existing gadget_area.tab.* value to style the tabs the way you want.

Your design choices will apply upon this basic framework, just as it does in iGoogle. We do support the same mutliple-layers approach, and could even support dynamic theme (the <Trait>  tag), if it were not for a CDN issue that we plan on fixing.

Parting words

This is just the very first step in a project that we intend to build more and more, like tools and directories. And this is where users are taking part: let us know what kind of customiztion you want to see, and we’ll do our best to improve our support for this Theme API, even by extending the original XML format.

That’s why the DevNet forum now features a dedicated forum for Themes development. Give us your feedback, and let’s work together in improving this great feature!

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The ability to work on blogs, and for that matter on any website,  has always been part of UWA starting with the now-deprecated BlogWidget method. BlogWidget was a nice first try at including UWA widget within the premises of a website, but in the long run was a hassle to instal, and for us it quickly became hard to maintain.

UWA compilers have improved a lot since last year, and the release of the Ecosystem was for us a chance to push further the proverbial envelope of exporting UWA widgets. So we built UWA export right into Ecosystem, and called it Share.

Let’s say you like news so much, you want your website’s visitors to see our New-York Times widget in your sidebar. With the new Share tool, this previously laborious task has gotten very easy: go to the widget’s Ecosystem page, and click on the Share button, located next to the widget preview, right between the install links for the current 5 support platforms and the Source button, in all its orange glory.

Clicking that link brings you to a whole new tool in Ecosystem, where you can configure the look of the widget for better inclusion in your website. There, you can change the widget’s title, its height and the color of the header. While make these changes, you can see them live in the preview on the right side of this export tool, and can even update the height manually rather than using the counter.

Since exported widget do not offer an Edit section (by design), this tools lets you configure the widget’s preferences directly.

Once you are happy with the preview, you can directly grab the HTML code in the section below. As you can see it’s still pretty close to the old BlogWidget method, but believe me, it really has improved since that first version, the export tool being just the surface of it.

The most advanced among you might even find it cool to dabble with the code directly rather than through the interface…

Stick that in your website’s HTML code, at the right place, upload, reload, and you should new be the proud owner of a UWA widget on your website!

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This specification is one important that we’ve meant to add to our .org website for a long time. Netvibes.org started as a repository for all our open-sourced code, among which the whole UWA code: its JavaScript Runtime and PHP libraries along with full in-code documentation, and even the fully-working Exposition server – the very same one that runs on our servers. All these tools were placed under GNU LGPL license, so as to facilitates the spread of this code to other projects and platforms.

For those willing to take part in the future of UWA, we also set up a public Trac tool for those who’d wish to submit an idea or a bug, or simply the changes to the public Subversion server.

The main point of all these releases was (and still is) to help UWA spread to other, yet-unsupported platforms. Being compatible with all major widget platforms (iGoogle, Windows Vista, Apple Dashboard, Live.com, iPhone, Opera, blogs, MySpace, etc.) sure is a great thing, but there are still many websites and widget engines users that could profit from the huge choice offered by our Ecosystem - and we can’t possibly handle them all

So the next natural step is to publish the UWA specification for all to see – and, mostly, platforms implementors. The current document is more of an Editor’s Draft than a real Working Draft (some sections are still missing, for instance), but this is as much details as we can give about the inner functioning of UWA without giving you the source-code – which we already give out anyway

We chose to license it under the Creative Commons BY-SA license, which should give enough freedom as to how you use it. But most importantly, we’d like to hear back from you about this document! This specification documents UWA 1.2, which is still very much in development, and not quite deployed yet, so this is your chance to participate directly in the evolution of the Universal Widget API!

See you on the forum!

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One of these “toys” is the expanded Timeline Search. As a Netvibes user, you must know about the User Timeline, where a user can post his good links, his favorite posts or simply his though of the moment, and let all your followers see them.

These three kinds of item can be posted to the timeline, respectively, using the Star-It widget (which uses the new widget.addStar() method, so you can also build starring within you own widgets), via a click on the little star that is displayed by some widgets (one of which is the internal feed reader, so that makes it easy for blog posts and podcasts), and the My Community widget (which you can find in the Essential Widget section of the Add Content panel). 

It’s all fine and dandy, but you might think that all this data is only available to logged-in Netvibes users who chose to follow your Universe – and therefore, quite walled-garden-y for the reste of teh intarwebs. Luckily, there’s more than that.

When we announced the Netvibes REST API a couple months ago, it already gave a lot of power to developers, like retrieving the whole content of a Netvibes Universe in XML form, but the documentation for the Timeline Search method wasn’t really complete a the time. We’ve been working towards improving it, and the result is that you can now easily use the Timeline data just about anywhere, thanks to an expanded set of options.

In short, the expanded Timeline Search makes it possible for anyone to create services or tools based on public Timeline data retrieval! Desktop apps, anyone?

The documentation itself features a handful of ideas already:

• Need to pull the 100 last public status updates in Atom format? You can do it.
• Want to know who’s been mentioning the iPhone 3G lately, and get it in JSON? Have a lookee here.
• Feel like visiting the recent favorite links of one’s followers, in XML? Here you go.
• Fan of the “FAIL” meme, and want to know who’s been commenting items with “FAIL”? Yup, can do.

This is just a part of what can be done with the REST API, and an avant-goût of things to come from our recent developments. Until we uncover these, you advise you to have a closer look at all the possibilities of the Netvibes REST API, which can offer a lot more than searching public timelines…
 

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A proper blogpost has already been published, summing up these releases, and most importantly the new netvibes.org website. You’ll find a lot of information over there, but keep on reading, ‘cos we have more

First, here’s the video I shot from the event, where our Chief Architect, and Head Mastermind behind UWA and netvibes.org’s projects, explains a lot about what he knows best. Watch the whole video to get a feeling of what Netvibes is offering today. It’s all in spoken French, but I took the time to put English subtitles everywhere so that everyone could understand it all.

Netvibes Platform

So there you go:

• netvibes.org is the central repository for all our open-source projects
• currently available projects are:
  • UWA JavaScript Runtime: JavaScript libraries that make it possible to run UWA widgets
  • PHP Exposition libraries: make it possible to parse and compile UWA widgets
  • Exposition widget server: makes it possible to serve widgets to users, notably within an iframe.

All these projects are available under the LGPLv3 license, which is very permissive, and are referred to as the Netvibes Platform. They are still in “technology preview” – a final version should be released in the coming months.

Along with zip-archives of the 3 projects, netvibes.org also features:

• full documentation of UWA JS Runtime (extracted from the code)
• full documentation of Exposition libraries (extracted from the code)
• the mandatory Trac, where you will be able to follow our progress, submit bug-reports, suggestion enhancements, and where some documentation will also find its place (i.e., how to run the Exposition Server).

An official Netvibes Platform forum exists for you to ask question and get support from the team and users.

What does this mean to you? Simply, it makes UWA more “universal” than ever! We read comments saying that UWA widgets working on the 8 major widget platforms (Netvibes, iGoogle, OS X Dashboard, Vista, Live.com, iPhone, Opera, blogwidget…) sure is great, but that apparently doesn’t make it universal enough…
Well, all these open-source components should help any implementer to port UWA to just about any platform, as long as it supports the usual Web standards: HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Everything is there: the Exposition widget server in order not to rely on Netvibes’ backend, the Exposition libraries in order to compile the widget to just about any of the currently supported platforms, and the UWA JS libraries so that all the client-side JS code of UWA widget works as expected.

All these components are the exact same as the ones we use. That doesn’t mean that Netvibes.com-the-startpage will be available as open-source, ready-to-install code, but it does mean that you can now handle UWA widgets your way, on your own system.

Now go download those archives, try them out, have fun with them, and let us know how we can, together, make them better!

But wait! There’s more!

There are still a few more cool things that might have gone under the radar, one of which being the official release of the UWA-Iframe method, which lets you display UWA widgets within your own environment (website, blog…), through a simple iframe. 

The UWA-Iframe method is the successor to the BlogWidget method, which lets you display UWA widget just about anywhere on the Web, using a simple iframe call to our servers. This new method is far better, and gives you full control over the way events are handled within your system.

This method has already been used in beta form by countless of projects, big or small, open-source or closed source, and it was already working quite well. Now that we have a far superior version, we are releasing it officially for all those who would like to implement widgets simply, in their system: Web portal, blogging tools, etc. For instance, the UWA implementation within JBoss Portal 2.6.3 is based on a previous version of this method.

There are a few other things cooking up, but I’ll talk about them here once a feel confident about their coherence and usefulness. For now, I’m sure you can already find plenty of code to have fun with using the above releases.

Let us know about how you would see them evolve!

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