Well, about 2 weeks of intensive programming and testing has seen me complete 2 new features for Widgely that I've wanted to do for a while, Template styles and a Rich Text Box Element.

Firstly I'll talk about styles, why I made them, how they are used and what you could use them for. I'll cover the Rich text box in another post, when I get some time

When I started this project, I had this image in my mind about how people would style their content using the site. I wanted them to be able to use a template, but if they didn't like the way it was laid out, or the colors, or whatever, they could just create their own style to override the default one, or use someones else's style. I pictured a drop down list of multiple styles, made by a bunch of different people, which when chosen, changed your contents look straight away.

Now, I'm not sure if I succeeded in making the actual style workshop as user friendly as I'd like, it is definitely a work in progress, and one I'll be improving more and more, but it is still fairly simple to create a new style for an existing template. As for changing styles on a piece of content, that couldn't be simpler.

Changing styles for your content
To change the style that your content uses to display, you just need to go to your home, and click the "view" link for the content you want to style.



You should now see you content displayed, with a few options above it. There is a drop down list of available styles, and a box with the embed code needed to place the content on your website. Choosing a new style using the drop down box will change your content straight away. You can click the "Make this style the default" link to make sure the content is always viewed with the current style.



The embed code area contains the code you can use to embed the content on your website. It uses the currently selected style as the style to embed. The copy code link on your home page will always use the default style you have for the content.