Widgets and Widget Types
So far in this manual, we have often used the word
widget to mean widget type
(it's difficult to avoid doing so), but it is important to clearly
understand the difference between the concepts
widget and widget type. If you
click on File > New >
(Core/Community) Widgets in
Content Studio,
then what you see in the displayed menu is a list of widget
types. If you click on one of the listed types - let's say
you click on Menu Widget - then this results in the
creation of an actual widget, an instance of the
widget type Menu. One of the things you are required to do when you
create any kind of widget, is to name the instance you have created by
setting it's Name
property. The following
illustration shows the property list for a newly-created menu widget:
the Title label is displayed in red, indicating
that this property is required.
Naming the widgets you create is important, because you can create many
widgets of the same type. You might, for example, call your Menu widget
Header Menu
, and place it in the Header area. But if
you also want your publication to include a footer menu, then you can
create another Menu widget called Footer Menu
and set
it up accordingly. A typical content template will usually contain
several instances of the Content Field widget type, each set up to
display a different content item field: a Title
widget displaying the title
field and a
Subtitle
widget displaying the
subtitle
field, for example.