Hi all,

A new innovation in version 2.3 (in RC2 now) has particular benefits to Widget developers.

You can now set themed CSS requirements from within a template with the tag:

<% require themedCSS(MyCssFile) %>

Why is this so great?

To style your widget in previous versions you had to call Requirements::themedCSS. This had to happen from somewhere in the Widget class when a piece of viewable data was requested. Since you never know if some designer is going to modify your widget template, you really should have been calling this for every field.

Now you can just place that tag at the beginning of your Widget template (.SS) file and let SilverStripe do the hard work! It saves you time and should execute quicker.

Regards,
Hamish

You could put the Requirements call in WidgetHolder, then return parent::WidgetHolder() (return nothing from the method and the widget wont display, handy for admin only widgets), which would get called when it gets rendered.

But this is far better, and less confusing, way to add in Requirements. If I recall correctly, you can do the same with <% require javascript(file) %>, thus ensuring that all your JS is included in the correct order, without overriding WidgetHolder().