Druplet

By dldege on 04.06.07 6:28 pm

nodelet? plug? pluglet? myNode, myThing…

yeah, druplet.

By roy on 04.06.07 6:56 pm

I think it’s a bit silly to stay away from ‘Gadget’ or ‘Widget’ just because other sites are using that vocabulary, because they’re just general vocabulary. Don’t treat them like they’ve been branded.

However, that’s not to say I don’t like ‘Droplet’ or ‘Druplet’.

A synonym to ‘widget’ is ‘gizmo’. Both define ’something that is very useful for a particular job’, which is arguable. I like ‘gadget’ because gadgets are typically not often very useful. ;)

By izb on 04.06.07 8:05 pm

Wasn’t ‘drop’ (number 6) the original name of Drupal?

http://drupal.org/node/769

was originally drop.org (as dorp.org was take… see link).

By Nicholas Thompson on 04.06.07 8:16 pm

All points well taken.

Here’s what I’m coding right now:

In the API, admin screen, and to Drupal coders, the widgets are called “droplets.”

To the user, in the UI, they are simply referred to as “content.” That part is trivial to change.

And “drupal” is a muddle of the Dutch for “drop,” (druppel, I believe) and drop.org was the original site.

By Ken Rickard on 04.06.07 8:32 pm

Hi Ken,

Droplet sounds best to me, makes sense as a word, sounds nice, still makes sense as a widget, ie a droplet of function rather than the whole thing, and of course keeps the drupal link as per “drop” the original drupal word.

By the way, can I ask if you intend to allow use of Drupal/Yahoo and other widgets via there apis? it would add a tremendous boost to the library of droplets. Maybe it makes sense to follow the universal widget api scheme started by netvibes.

Anyway, I will keenly follow your progress sounds like an excellent module. Good luck with it.

By Mark Ranford on 04.07.07 3:54 am

hmm isnt a “droplet” a mac thing?

so ill vote for drüplet
-as every body knows it will sound so much cooler with umlaut ;)

By morten.dk on 04.07.07 1:59 pm

@Mark -

Due to license restrictions, I will not be auto-importing Yahoo! or Google widgets into MySite. I will support using them, but not in an automated way. There are also some security issues dealing with 3rd-party JavaScript that I will leave to the site admin’s discretion. See http://drupal.org/node/127661 for discussion.

MySite already has an API for leveraging other Drupal APIs. See http://drupal.org/node/100871 for example.

I had never seen NetVibes before, but it actually does exactly what I’m aiming for. The UWA (http://dev.netvibes.com/doc/uwa_specification) seems like a good starting point. Perhaps later we’ll work on a system for browsing and copying those (and other) widgets into the MySite framework, but for now, admins will have to copy the code across manually. Again, I have license and security concerns about harvesting that code.

@Morten - I think Droplet is a PhotoShop term, but we could still use it. Though NetVibes uses widget, and it may make sense to follow that trend.

By Ken Rickard on 04.07.07 3:34 pm