New Applicants Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X

dan39

New Applicants Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X

MichaelGraves

All I ever see is:
Not Signed In
[sign in]

Minisweeper

I'm curious if this extension will still work at all since the way of dealing with applicants has changed...

Wanderer

It seems to be working, I got a new applicant yesterday, I discovered it via the Widget, clicked on the Widget, it took me to the relevant page on the forum.

Magic.

Posted: Saturday, 2 June 2007 at 7:54AM

Lussumo Bot

Uploaded version 1.0.1 of New Applicants Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X.

dan39

The widget now takes you to the Applicants Approval Page when clicked on.

silent1643

aww where is the one for windows :(

dan39

It should be pretty easy to make one. I don't own a copy of Vista, so I won't be developing one any time soon.

You could try this converter and see what happens: Convert web widgets into vista gadgets

No matter what platform you develop a New Applicants Count Widget/Gadget for, you'll need the New Applicants Count XHR 1.0 add-on in order to broadcast the count in a readable format.

In fact, you don't even need a widget to see the count. You can just install the XHR add-on and bookmark the output URL in your browser. Whenever you check the bookmark, you'll see the number of new applicants. It's not as convenient as a widget, but it works.

Hamed

pretty cool

DG55

I don't understand, seems to let me see the new applicants even though im not signed in?

Also, it would be great if it could show you the amount of new posts since your last visit.

dan39

It's designed to work whether you are logged in or not. Adding log-in functionality directly into the widget itself would be pretty complex. I know Google's GMail widget does this very well, but that's way out of my league.

And you'd need to tweak the New Applicants XHR add-on since that is what is actually broadcasting your number of new applicants on your website anyway.

And I'd be against making it so that you needed to be signed in to your vanilla forum via your web browser to access the New Applicants XHR, because it would create all sorts of usability issues for the widget. (What if you're signed into your site on Firefox, but not with Safari? Not a good user experience at all.)

Since widgets use a layer of WebKit, you might be able to do a modification to the XHR add-on by adding something like this around the New Applicants XHR add-on code:

if ($Context->Session->User->RoleID == 4 ) { // New Applicants XHR add on code goes here }
But, it's really not worth the hassle, in my opinion. And there's no guarantee it will continue to work once you quit Safari (my guess is that it won't). So, imagine a widget that only worked when you have Safari open and logged into a specific site. It would be a really annoying widget.

And personally, I think you'd have to be pretty paranoid to want to do that. But, whatever... you're welcome to give it a try.

I'm also against adding more functionality into the widget (such as number of new posts, as you are suggesting). According to Apple's Developer Resources on Designing Widgets (and I'll easily defer to Apple on this subject on any day) each widget should only focus on one task.

Design your widget to have a discrete functionality. It should require no explanation or configuration. Instead of creating a widget that does three things, try creating three widgets that do one thing each. This makes each task discrete and lets your users choose what is useful for them. A cluttered widget is a jack of all trades, master of none.

If you really want to find out the number of new posts since your last visit (and I'm pretty sure that's what RSS is for), you should really build an entirely new widget and call it "Number of New Posts Widget".

This is just a very simple New Applicants Widget....nothing more.

silver-dragon

I am not able to get this to work.


This is what I see when I insert my URL

dan39

Re-read the directions closely.

You need New Applicants XHR 1.0 for this to work. Make sure that you can access the outputted URL from the New Applicants XHR add on before you try the widget. The very fact that your widget is displaying the "sign in" link leads me to believe that your New Applicants XHR isn't set up properly... or that you aren't pointing your widget to the URL of your vanilla install.

Basically, all the Widget does is append the remainder of the New Applicants XHR outputted URL to the URL that you put into the widget.

So, if your New Applicants XHR URL is:

http://yoursite.com/extension.php?PostBackAction=NewApplicantsCountXHR

... then you just type in "http://yoursite.com" and the Widget will add the "/extension.php?PostBackAction=NewApplicantsCountXHR" to the end of the URL. That's why you're not supposed to add a trailing slash when you type your site into the widget.

Obviously, if you can't get

http://yoursite.com/extension.php?PostBackAction=NewApplicantsCountXHR

to work, then you have other problems that aren't related to the Widget.

Pifman

Also don't forget to activate the extension in your forum before adding the url to the widget. That's the step I was missing and it took me awhile to figure out since it's the first extension I've added.

Settings > Extensions > Check the "New Applicants Count XHR 1.0" Box