The EPiServer World Gadget

Like a very naughty school kid, I always leave my homework to the very last minute.......

Here is (my first :) contribution to the EPiServer Gadget contest 2009.

Presenting......

The EPiServer World Gadget

I wanted to try and make a gadget that would be useful to the whole range of typical site stakeholders, from content editors to web admins to developers. After some brainstorming here at Cimex towers we came up with this.

Fellow developers will be pretty familiar with the concept, every time you open up Visual Studio you'll see Microsoft pushing the latest ASP.NET news directly into your IDE. Why not do the same thing but with EPiServer content directly into EPiServer Site Center?

Ok - so the cynics amongst you will be thinking that this is nothing more than just a styled RSS Feed gadget and you'd be right, but wait.... I've also utilised the Dynamic Data Store so that you can save your favourite EPiServer content against your profile, so no more trawling through the world.episerver.com archives to find that great article you read about EPiServer Mail 4.4!

I just picked out three areas of content from EPiServer World; Articles, Blogs and Forum. Obviously the content editors at EPiServer might have different ideas about which content to push. The usefulness of the gadget is I think, only really limited by the content/data feeds being produced on EPiServer World. With the right content being pushed into Site Center I think this gadget could really help the EPiServer community to grow.

Extending this idea: I've provided a more basic implementation here, but with some more joined up thinking you could create some much cooler features.

For example, how about finding a way to link your EPiServer world account to your local EPiServer site login, so that you could aggregate all of your personal contributions to the EpiWorld community on the Site center. I could see this being most useful to clients who interface only with an EPiServer 6 powered site (rather than us Partner and Developer types), as it would provide a single point of access to all of their EPiServer based work stream.

Installing the gadget

I've put together an installer file, which can be used with EPiServer Deployment Centre

The source code lives here