Materia
V11

Managing Widgets

for your copy of Materia

Installing Widget Packages

Materia widgets are distributed in the form of a .wigt file. These files contain all the code, assets, and data needed to install a widget. To learn more about how widgets are built, check out the Widget Developer Guide.

Finding Widgets to Install

Widgets are maintained serpately from Materia itself, each having its own, independent development cycle. We have a Materia Widget Gallery that searches github for all publicly shared widgets.

Note: The Widget Gallery will include widgets made by the core Materia development team and 3rd parties.

Installing Default Widgets

For first-time setup, particularly in development environments, you can use a python management command to quickly install a set of default widgets:

$ python manage.py post-install install_from_config

Installing Widgets from the Admin Panel

Materia’s admin panel allows administrators to upload new widgets. Log in as an administrator, and navigate to the Admin Widget Page (https://your-materia-institution.edu/admin/widget/). Uploading a widget is as easy as clicking upload and selecting the .wigt file from your computer.

Screen Capture showing the Widget Admin Panel
Screen Capture showing the Widget Admin Panel

Upgrading a widget is as easy as installing a new one for the first time. A widget’s clean_name is used to identify whether the widget has been previously installed.

Installing Widgets from the Command Line

Widget installation can be performed via the command line through Django’s management commands. Doing so requires shell access to the python container.

python manage.py widget install_from_file path/to/widget.wigt

Alternatively, widgets can be installed directly from a URL through management commands:

python manage.py widget install_from_url_no_verify https://widget-repository-url/widget.wigt

Automatic Widget Updates

With Materia v11, open source first-party widgets hosted on GitHub contain the metadata to enable automatic updates. Once a widget is installed or updated to include this metadata, you can easily check for updates by selecting the “Check for Updates” button. If an update is available, simply select “Update” to install the new version.

A series of widgets that have available updates in the widget admin panel.
A series of widgets that have available updates in the widget admin panel.

This feature is limited to widgets in public repositories. Not all first-party widgets authored by UCF are publicly available.