Allowing the user to create his own widget??

I like your idea. It mostly involves creating a user interface and handling the permission to allow users to create widgets.

Our current plan is to allow the administrator to create widgets from various sources (pages, blocks, nodes, views, feeds). So, to implement your idea, the admin could create a view that displays nodes given a certain taxonomy term or author. The admin could then turn that view into a widget and the user could embed that view for whatever taxonomy term he chooses.

So, in a way, our current plan will accomplish this. It just won't have a user interface to allow users to create their own widgets, but this could certainly be added as a feature at some point.

Maybe just allow the user to customize it. Height and Width is always my concern when embedding a Widget to make sure it fits on the sidebar.

Some of this could be accomplished using node queues, though not selecting multiple specific terms. Given the page and views integration you should be able to grab any single term for your widget, but I'm not sure how this could be accomplished without giving users access to Views.

Any ideas for how that might work?

A view that can be customized with terms sounds like a view that accepts arguments. The problem then becomes how to enable users to specify the argument they want to feed to the view. I see this breaking down into these pieces:

1. A site administrator creates an embed widget.

2. A particular user wanting to embed the widget configures it before generating the embed code. In this case, that means selecting the arguments to feed into a view.

So embed widgets would need a way to describe their configuration options. And, for widgets embedding views, we would need a UI for selecting arguments to feed.

In the end, the argument(s) would simply translate into a path to feed into the widget URL in the embed code, e.g., myview/23 where 23 is a term ID.

I haven't messed around much with Views 2, but can you string together a series of arguments? Can they be different sorts of arguments?

I'm curious about whether a user can string together a few arguments, and if so, what sorts of restrictions would be placed on them. For example, you mentioned term ID, which really would already be possible with pulling pages (since that's a single page, I assume it could be embedded via the iframe method) or via the term's feed.

Here are a few other scenarios I'd be interested in examining:

• multiple vocabularies, so more like term/foo+bar
• filtering based on a user
• combining vocabulary and other filters, such as user, user role, node type, etc.

I think these items are a bit out of the scope atm, but as John said, a good user interface could/should definitely be added later.

Could be useful: http://drupal.org/project/views_argument_api

we built out a custom ui at http://maplight.org/widgets that could perhaps be made generic enough for general use. however, the example also demonstrate that no matter what is provided will always require some development for specific needs. having a strong api should make the development easier, in any case.

+1 for #7's generic UI. Also maybe theming, etc.