Jahia is one of the best Java WCMs and KickApps is one of the best social media platforms.  I decided to put the KickApps widget into a Jahia module and see what I could do.

But first, I would like to discuss KickApps. Its mainly a social platform for creating and adding social network features like widgets to websites.

My idea was to incorporate a “latest posts” KickApps feature into a Jahia module.  The module should be dynamic and able to incorporate into any Jahia website without major changes or probably without doing any changes.

KickApps lets you create a wide type of widgets using the App Studio tool incorporated into the Jahia platform. You can create video players, audio players, slideshows, 3D Gallery, carousels and some more. Among these components there is the “Widget Gallery Zone”; in this section a user can select and customize between several types of widgets, customize background colors, fonts, scrollbars, layouts and some other settings.

Among the customizable things the widget developer can select is the content the widget will display by specifying the feed or the media URL the widget will read. This feature is essential to what we want to accomplish which is display any type of information inside the widget, well the information can be of any type, but the way the data is fed to the widget needs to be based on RSS structure.

After saving the widget into the App Studio tool inside KickApps administration panel you will be able to get the code for it as embedded code. The code is almost ready to copy and paste it to an HTML container. What the widget code will do is put a flash piece with the information and the characteristics set for it.

This HTML will be converted into a Jahia template and set it for a Jahia container. The template has a variable that will be the RSS feed the content editor wants to display in the KickApps widget. The feed URL needs to be converted into UTF-8 characters and the set it inside the flash param values.

After this, the Jahia module that contains the widget can be set to any page inside the website.

KickApps has very interesting social media widgets that can be set to any website, and Jahia lets you incorporate these features into its websites.

1. Create, edit and save the KickApps widget inside KickApps App Studio tool.

1. Get the embedded code from the App Studio.

1. Create a Jahia Template and set the URL feed as a property.

1. Incorporate the embedded code with the template property and store it as Jahia module.

1. Put it in any Jahia website.

If you have comments please post them and I will be glad to help you.