Widgets are a great way to share content across your site for three reasons:

• They automatically update as new content gets posted.

EXAMPLE: The Latest Discussions widget displays the latest discussions posts and automatically shows new discussions as they're posted. The benefit is two-fold: Widgets ensure fresh content is always available for your users and they require minimal maintenance.

• They respect security settings and user access on a per-user basis, dynamically showing only the content available to each user.

EXAMPLE: When Mary views the Latest Discussions widget, she only sees posts from communities she belongs to, while John only sees posts from communities he belongs to, and so on.

• They have configurable parameters with which you can customize them.

You should take advantage of the benefits that are offered by these customizable widgets so that automated and dynamic updates keep your site content fresh and your community managers focused on user-engagement tasks and projects.

Widget categories

There are dozens of widgets available, and they're grouped into categories based on their associated module or function (e.g., blogs, discussions, communities, libraries).

TIP: When editing a page, click the Category menu on the Build tab to view the widget categories. After selecting a category, its widgets are displayed.

Widget articles

The Widgets section of the knowledge base has more than a dozen articles discussing our various widgets. The articles list and describe the widgets that are in each category.

TIP: Use these articles to get an understanding of what a widget does or to determine which widget is the best option for what you're trying to accomplish.

Add a widget

To learn how to add widgets, refer to the Build Page Layout & Content article.

Widget parameters

There are dozens of widgets, and most have several configuration parameters that enable you to customize the content, layout, and appearance of the widget.

TIP: When editing a widget, the field names and descriptions make it easier to understand each parameter's purpose, as shown in the following example.

Popular widgets

Although there are dozens of widgets available, you're most likely to use those in the Feeds category because they automatically display the latest content from across Higher Logic's core modules (announcements, discussions, blogs, etc.).

NOTE: These are typically the default widgets on the landing page and home pages of most sites.

Best-practice Feed widgets

Like all widgets, each best-practice widget will display content based on its configured parameters. The best-practice widgets are described below.