Magento Widgets are Magento extensions with a predefined set of configuration options through which the store administrators can enrich the front-end blocks functionality. The widgets options can be tuned by the Magento store administrators once installed. Magento Widgets allow business users with no technical knowledge to easily add dynamic content to pages in Magento Stores. Here is all about using widgets with Magento. They provide great control and flexibility in creating marketing and informational content through the Magento administrator panel such as
How to develop a Magento widget
Developing a widget doesn’t differ much from developing a regular Magento extension which provides some frontend functionality. One can also develop extensions which add placement control and configuration options to the functionality which already exists in other extensions.
Create an empty module: You have to create a module code folder under an appropriate code pool to start a new Magento module. The folder should contain a default module helper and a module configuration file called config.xml.
Define the “enabler” file: You should also add a small “enabler” file under folder that will enable Magento to know that the new module is available and resides in the specific code pool. You have to define the dependencies and code pool of the module in this file and you can also specify here whether the module is enabled or disabled. Specifying the dependencies guarantees that your module is installed after the modules on which your module depends on.
Create the default module helper: In order to make translation subsystem work properly, the default helper should be defined.
Create the configuration file: Define the module version in the configuration file. Also, we have to define a helper and blocks base class names as long as we need to create our module in the custom namespace.
Declare widgets: Widgets provided by the module must be declared in the widget.xml file under the module’s etc/ folder. A minimal declaration of the widget must contain the following:
How to install widgets