Showcase Widget Renderers

Alright Bob, in light of recent events, I'm looking into the idea of building a Widget Page with a custom layout to list SC items and display custom SC fields (timeslip and dyno lists). I just need to figure out what is possible based on built-in functionality and what will require custom coding.

I believe I will need to have a custom renderer (or a few) created mainly because I'll need to specify a sorting method around a custom field. The Showcase: Items renderer would probably be used as a starting point and modified to sort by custom field. I figure I'll need a custom renderer for each sorting option and each filtered option.

Ideally the Widget Page would have the same Filter functionality that is found on the SC pages, but I realize that would require extensive custom coding, so what I'll likely try to do is create multiple widgets (using custom renderers) and group them by tabs, each tab being a filtered view based on different custom field criteria and sorting.

My thought was I could use the Custom View option and build out a template that uses XF tables, similar to the way Optima did with the Timeslips add-on he created. This way I can control the look and feel.

What I'm not sure about is getting the list to paginate. Can any of the built-in renderers paginate? Even if it just uses the SC items per page setting, that's all I'd need. If not I suppose I'll have to just make the page really long and limit to a number of items. Is there a point where the page load time would suffer due to the number of items being loaded?

Does all of this sound like a good path to go down? Since Optima isn't really maintaining his add-on, and since I already have all the custom fields his add-on creates and they're filled with data, I don't know that I really need to use his add-on anyway. I just need to find an efficient way to display that data on pages.

 

Well alright then! I'll go back to the previous plan of using Optima's add-on and modifying it to work.