Custom widget installation and management

[letsfindaway]

OpenBoard comes with a set of built-in widgets. In addition, a user can install additional widgets.

There are some sites on the Internet that recommend copying such widgets to the OpenBoard installation directory. This is bad practice, and in fact OpenBoard already provides a better mechanism for this.

Widget folders

OpenBoard searched for widgets in the following locations:

• $appdir/library/applications contains widgets for the Applications folder.
• $appdir/library/interactivities contains widgets for the Interactivities folder.
• $usrdir/interactive content contains user provided widgets for the Applications folder.

There is no folder for user provided interactivities.

Applications and Interactivities

In the library OpenBoard distinguishes Applications and Interactivities. Technically, however, they are identical, besides the fact, that the Applications folder additionally contains the C++ tools. There is no way to distinguish an application and an interactivity.

Installing user widgets

The current situation is as follows:

• Some sites on the Internet hosting third party widgets recommend copying them to the installation folder. This is a bad place: A user should never modify the content of the installation. When updating, such widgets are lost.
• When dropping a .wgt directory on the library, OpenBoard tries to copy the content to the installation folder for interactivities, i.e. $appdir/library/interactivities. Same bad practive. Additionally, this folder is not user writable on Linux.
• But there is no mechanism to copy user widgets to $usrdir/interactive content, which would be the preferred way.

Questions

Some questions have to be answered before looking for a good solution:

• Should the user be able to install a widget to either Interactivities or Applications, i.e. is it necessary to distinguish them for user widgets? Here I need feedback.
• Is DnD of widgets folders the preferred mechanism to install custom widgets? My answer would be yes, it is the same mechanism as for images, videos and audios.
• Is it necessary or useful to distinguish system installed and user installed widgets, e.g. by some decoration of the icon or a tooltip? Note that system installed widgets cannot be deleted, where user installed widgets can. Personally, I would recommend an icon decoration.
• If we distinguish Interactivities and Applications, how can I move a widget from one location to the other? As both folders are on the same level and both contain technically indistinguishable widgets, DnD will not work.

[letsfindaway]

Ideas

I have some ideas to improve the situation.

"Interactivities" as subfolder of "Applications"

Making "Interactivities" a subfolder of "Applications" would easily allow to assign a custom widget to either category and also allow to move them around by DnD. To improve visibility of subfolders, they should be the very first items in the library. Currently, they are the first items after the C++ tools.

Install from download

We could improve the way you install a widget downloaded from the Internet. OpenBoard could e.g. inspect any downloaded zip file. If it contains a single top-level folder ending with .wgt, then we could ask the user whether this file should be installed as a custom widget. Probably other sanity checks could be performed, e.g. checking the config.xml file for existence and syntax.

This would enable very simple single-click installation of custom widgets.