Help:Widgets



Widgets are boxes that can be dragged-and-dropped onto the Monaco sidebar, containing a set of links or functions that may be useful for your wiki.

They can be added to the left-hand navigation sidebar, or accessed through the Widget Dashboard, and you can arrange the widgets to suit your preferences.

Adding widgets
To explore and add widgets, choose "Manage widgets" from the bottom of the drop-down list in your user bar at the top of the page.

You will see a row of icons appear at the top of the article space, the "widget carousel", which you can scroll left/right. Click the green "+" icon next to a widget to add it to your sidebar, and close the bar using the red "X"

Alternatively, you can visit Special:Widgets. This list also behaves like the widget bar - you can click the green "+" button to add items from this list to the sidebar.

Using widgets
The wrench icon is used to customize settings, and the up/down arrows expand and minimize widgets. Clicking on the 'x' in the right corner closes the widget.

Widget dashboard
The Widget Dashboard is a special page where you can arrange any or all the widgets you want to review at one time to get a quick snapshot of what is happening on your wiki - it provides more space for you to work with than the sidebar. To add widgets to this page, add widgets to your sidebar, then drag them to this page.

Visit it at Special:WidgetDashboard, and read more at Help:Widget Dashboard.

Full list of widgets
Not quite sure what each widget is capable of? Here is a comprehensive list of all widgets and how they can be used:

Create a custom widget
At MediaWiki:Widgetwikipage a sysop can design a widget that is readily accessible by all users of that specific community wiki. This can be leveraged to
 * complement the links accessible via the Link Toolbox, page footer or page header
 * provide easy access to custom functions written as javascript
 * provide easy access to a semantic (partial) form with which to edit the current page
 * present useful information (weather, tidal clock, etc.)
 * present useless information (biorhythms, zodiac readings, etc.)
 * ... maybe you can think of other applications

Users without sysop privileges can still create a custom widget using any wiki article ... such as a sub-page to their Special:MyPage - e.g. User:Mary/mywidget

To make that custom widget appear in the sidebar:
 * 1) Add the "Wiki Page in widget" to the sidebar (using either Special:Widgets or the widget carousel)
 * 2) Click the spanner sprite (in top right corner) to reveal the configuration window
 * 3) * beside Title of widget: enter any arbitrary name e.g. Useful Links
 * 4) * beside Source page: enter the wiki article name e.g. User:Mary/mywidget (take care to prepend the colon e.g. ":DemoWidget" when specifying a source page that is in the main namespace)
 * 5) * click Save
 * 6) You may drag that widget into your Special:WidgetDashboard or leave it in the Monaco sidebar.
 * 7) You cannot share that widget via the widget carousel or Special:Widgets but
 * 8) * you can easily create a category e.g. "User widgets" that visitors to your wiki can browse to see what creative ideas your community members have come up with
 * 9) * Of course, each user will need to follow steps 1 & 2 to adopt that widget into their Monaco sidebar

Customizing the site-wide Widgetwikipage
Aside from customizing the content via MediaWiki:Widgetwikipage a sysop can also customize:
 * 1) Title (MediaWiki:Widget-title-wikipage) which does appear in: Special:Widgets but not in: the widget carousel, the sidebar or Special:WidgetDashboard
 * 2) Description (MediaWiki:Widget-desc-wikipage) which does appear in: Special:Widgets but not in: the widget carousel
 * 3) Labels used in the widget configuration window:
 * 4) * Title of widget (MediaWiki:Widget-wikipage-title)
 * 5) * Source page (MediaWiki:Widget-wikipage-source)

By customizing Title and Description you can better feature your community's custom widget because Special:Widgets lists all available widgets in alphabetical order. The widget carousel (a.k.a. Manage widgets) does not use alphabetical order, in fact it does not adopt the title or description specified via those two WikiMedia messages. Whether this is a bug or merely a limitation of the current design of that special "cockpit" header area is not clear.

Miscellaneous page-focus links
The following are suggestions that complement the already existing links which operate on the currently displayed page. In each case the magic words FULLPAGENAME or PAGENAME are used to give focus to the link. Make a custom widget


 * Caveats
 * 1) There is a limit to how complex your widget definition can become. It is not a simple character or byte count limit.
 * 2) * In the example shown above the addition of just 7 ASCII characters from the empty HTML comment: - is enough to cause the widget to fail to render in the sidebar even though it renders perfectly well at it's definition page.
 * 3) The rendered height of the Widgetwikipage is variable up to a point and after that a scroll bar appears for any content which overflows.

Embedding
Most Widgets can also be embedded directly into a page, see Help:WidgetTag for more details.

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