The Flux Widget Developer Kit (WDK) officially launched on 3/6/08. This is great news for developers building integrated websites on the Flux Platform as it exposes a common, easily customizable framework upon which all widgets are built. This release now allows for 3 levels of customization when creating your own widgets. In the most simple cases, simply use the editor to style your widgets and drop the codes onto your pages. If you require additional customization, the WDK allows both mark-up and functionality of the widgets to be easily customized to suit your needs. However, if you want to just take your data and create your own widgets from the ground up, simply use the Data Access API (DAAPI) to retrieve the data and have complete control over your widget.

The widget pick-up page (accessible via the Community Manager for community admins) is the hub from which you can create and customize your widgets. As described above, every widget now comes with a editor and as a developer you also have access to the widget's mark-up for additional customization to override it's default look and feel. Additionally, the core functionality of the widget can be overridden if necessary by providing an additional javascript file with custom logic.

Full WDK documentation is provided here. It provides details on every aspect of the WDK, including:
   • Generating your widget codes
   • Customizing the mark-up of a widget
   • Customizing the functionality of a widget
   • Using FTP to host custom HTML and JS codes for your widgets on the Flux static servers

To illustrate why the WDK is such a powerful tool for developers, an example is provided below. This shows how the default Content Action widget provided on the Flux Platform has been customized to achieve a completely custom look for the MTV.com website.

Default Content Action Widget:

Custom Content Action Widget: