Can MySite use Google gadgets?

Ah. By 'duplicates' I mean "It duplicates the ability to create and store such widgets within the Drupal framework."

It does not respect the use of Google widgets on Drupal-powered pages, as I suspect there are both technical and legal reasons not to do so.

Looking at that XML file, it might be possible to replicate the widget -- you'd likely need to include the <script> that would generate the content. See http://www.google.com/apis/gadgets/publish.html#Syndication

There are security concerns about applying 3rd-party JavaScript to any site, so we'd have to look carefully at adding actual Google widgets.

Can you take a look at the license and terms of use for Google widgets and report back?

See http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/terms.html

More accurate title. Moving to v5, since v4.7 is closed to feature development.

Apparently, we'd select content from: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open&source=gghp.

Writing an include that would allow site admins to select which gadgets to offer on their sites would work. There are two things that need to be done first:

1) Extend the data API to include a 'content' element of the array. In the case where 'content' exists, it would be printed in addition to 'title' or instead of 'teaser'. This would allow widgets to guarentee that they get seen in all layouts and formats.

2) Create a menu callback that allows the Add/Remove content page to be separated into distinct pages per content type. This would allow us to display a gadget grid and make finding gadgets easier.

MySite probably should support this. It would be left to administrators to select and test the gadgets they want available to users.

The Google Terms of Service may prohibit using these gadgets. http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html

Personal Use Only

The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales. You may not take the results from a Google search and reformat and display them, or mirror the Google home page or results pages on your Web site. You may not "meta-search" Google. If you want to make commercial use of the Google Services, you must enter into an agreement with Google to do so in advance. Please contact us for more information.

However, that may be up to the site developer; not to me.

See also: http://www.google.com/personalized_homepage_dmca.html

These types of restrictions, plus the fact that Google reserves the right to ad content to the gadgets sugget to me that we may be better off replicating the framework but not the gadgets themselves.

OK, here's where I think we stand.

1) Google Gadgets will be 'supported' just like any arbitrary code that an admin might want to add to MySite.
2) Special code for handling Google Gadgets will _not_ be provided by MySite. This means that no automated search/retrieval of Google Gadgets will fo into the source code. Admins will have to search/copy/paste on their own. This is due to the non-commercial license elements of Google's T & C.

There are two ways that we might solve that issue.

1) Create Block support in MySite. I've historically been against this, but am warming to it.
2) Follow the http://drupal.org/node/127661#comment-213262 plan.

For the time being, you might try to write a block.inc file. It would need to leverage the {mysite_content} table. The refine.inc plugin available in the 4.7 tarball gives some examples. You need to use {mysite_content} because Block identifiers are not integers. They are {module_name}-{delta} strings.

See http://drupal.org/node/128185 for block progress

Committed to HEAD.