For this post, I'm going to lead off with a quote from Men In Black II (copied from IMDB):Agent J: Wait, what are you doing?Kevin Brown/K: I always do the driving.Agent J: Oh, no...Kevin Brown/K: I remember that.Agent J: No, what you remember is that you used to drive that old busted jawn. See, I drive the new hotness.[pointing at K] Agent J: Old and busted. [pointing at himself]Agent J: New hotness.This is very appropriate for the current transition we're living through in terms of technology and the web. It seems like everyone is chiming in, but in every article I've read recently

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Welcome back, my friends, to the blog that never ends.Seriously, though, this will be the final widget development installment. Hopefully you've memorized parts 1 and 2, or at least understand what on Earth they're talking about. In this post we'll bring it all together and use information and code from prior posts to set the output of this widget.As I mentioned previously, I will actually have two different modes of output for the foursquare-powered HereNow widget I've been working on.In the initial output, I will use a .NET web request and generated C# class to handle the returned

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Hopefully you've read part 1 or are already familiar with the general way a widget works. If not, go for it. This post will still be here (but I won't, I can't hang around all day).In this post, I'm going to walk through creating a foursquare widget I recently developed in order to share the users who have checked in at your venue. Just finished it up this morning, as a matter of fact. What I had in mind was for a social brick-and-mortar franchise, like a coffee shop, to be able to list on their web site the visitors who've checked in to any particular venue.The foursquare APIThe

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Developing widgets.No, no! It's ok, don't run! It's not that bad. Honestly!Ok, so widget development is one place where many Ektron beginners get lost and turn away. Why? It looks complicated. Well, it isn't and it is. Pagebuilder is a complex thing, sure. I've met the guy who developed it, and he's pretty darn awesome at what he does. That being said, widgets aren't all that complex once you understand how to approach them and understand how the parts work together to make a whole.Piece 1: Proper Widget PropertiesIf you've made user controls before, you probably are already familiar

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The PageBuilder concept is pretty awesome. The more I use it, the more I've come to like it. It takes what might normally be developer tasks and puts them into the hands of the content owners.For a long while, though, I was under the impression that, in order for all pages to benefit from PageBuilder flexibility, the author would have to do double the work by creating not only the content, but a new Page Layout to go with it. Not so, my past, ignorant self, not so at all.In fact, I learned something that has the potential to turn this notion around significantly. A while back, I was

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