Jeff wrote a post to explain the differences between a widget and a plugin, and that got me thinking. Does WordPress need a system for creating widgets that doesn’t involve writing a plugin?
In my view there are two types of widget. A widget that gets data from WordPress, and a widget that gets data from outside WordPress. In the first case some PHP will clearly be required, but the second? I think not.
There are a limited number of things that you might want to do to WordPress information when you display it in a widget. You may want to filter the data, combine two sets of data, limit the data, or add to the data, and you will usually want to do it to multiple records. Lastly you will want to create an HTML template, and a CSS template to use when outputing it.
It seems to me that these kinds of manipulations could be done with some kind of pseudo code, or even a simple UI so that all users can join in creating widgets, not just those that know how to write a plugin and use the WordPress API.
If you don’t know how to code PHP and if this kind of system was available is there any kind of widget that you would want, that you don’t have right now?