Hi, thanks for stopping by the widgely blog :)

Widgely.com is a template and document creation website that lets anybody make their own templates and use other peoples templates to make cool looking documents. I built widgely so that I could make things that my family, friends and I needed. But also, I wanted an easy way for people who didn't have the inclination or perhaps the ability on computers, to easily create documents from templates already made by somebody else.

So please, feel free to use the templates you find, or create your own.

I'll be using this blog to post about the things I'm working on, any new additions to the site and anything else I think of. I'm hoping to add a few tutorials on creating content, so please, if you have any suggestions, leave a comment :)

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I've just completed 2 new elements for use within the advanced template workshop: The Toggle Element and the Rich Text Formatting Box. I was working on these elements for another project, but thought I would release them for Widgely too.

Toggle Element

The toggle element works like a checkbox. It has 2 states, on or off. Clicking the element will toggle it to its opposite state. Ive made the toggle box use the background-image setting as the image it will show when toggled on, so you can make it look like anything by just providing an image for it. At the moment toggle elements cannot be linked, but in the future I will be adding code to enable linking toggle boxes together. This will make them work more radio buttons.

Rich Text Formatting Box

A Rich Text Formatting Box allows you to add text to a template that cannot be edited from within the document created from it. Unlike the current formatting element, this new one will allow multi-line rich text so that template creators can add richer text areas to their templates.

I've just finished programming multi-page functionality into the templates and documents produced through Widgely. This is a something that I've enabled because of other projects that are sharing the Widgely code-base, and I thought I'd allow Widgely to use too.

One of the things I wanted to achieve when creating Widgely was to build a code-base that is easy to expand and also to copy. I've always wanted it so that I could easily make another site and have it share the majority of the code thats already been written. I've spent the past week or so testing and fixing the base code to enable this.

Multi-page templates

When creating a template using the advanced workshop, there is now the ability to add extra pages to it. Each extra page is basically a new template, allowing you to do anything that you could normally do when editing one.

When creating a document from the template, the user can change pages when editing or viewing the document. On downloading the document as a PDF, all the pages will be downloaded.

I spent a little time a weekend ago making some new borders and decoration images that can be used in the templates and documents. I wanted to make a range of borders that could have decorations placed in the corners so came up with a design that includes some square areas protruding from the corner. I made a Reading Camp Survivor template with this that has different book decorations in the corners - though these can be changed to any of the decorations in the system.


These are just a couple of the new decorations that I added too. There is also a red covered book, and images of the books flipped around. I wanted to add some more sport images as well, and spent some time on this Tennis Racket one. I actually made this on so that the strings are transparent .. so any images behind this one will be seen through the strings. I'll be writing up a tutorial soon on how I make these images. Widgely.com allows any user to upload their own images to create templates or use them in other peoples templates. This means you can make a huge range of documents, but it also means you have complete control of how you want your templates to look. We support 24-bit transparent PNG images across all of the major browsers (including IE6) so that your templates that use them look good on all the browsers.

If anyone has suggestions about images they would like to see, please leave a comment and I'll see what I can do

Ive just released the 2 functions I've been spending most of my time on in the last few weeks; PDF download and a Widgely Template Wizard.

Because of the difficulties in printing anything consistently from a web browser, PDF download has always been something I wanted to provide. Now, with any published document you will find a Download button on the view and edit page. Clicking this will open or save the PDF file.

I've tried to replicate the look of the template on the browser as much as I could. However, because of the differences between the browsers, I had to make a choice about which to make the PDF look closest to. Because I work using Firefox, I chose it to base the look upon. There shouldn't be too many differences, but one thing that I've noticed is that Firefox and IE do the border styles differently. So if you chose "outset" or "ridge" border, the PDF output will probably look like Firefox's version of that border.

All of the things that you can do with Widgely should work in the PDF. This includes Image elements, repeating background images, element opacity, Rich Text Element formatting etc. I'll be working on providing extra functionality on this as I develop further.

The Template Wizard grew out of my worries that building Template was too complex. Im not sure if this is the solution, or if it goes much towards making it easier. Some feedback from testers seems to show it IS easier to use. but other things within it have confused them. I expect this to change alot in the future.