We have recently blogged about three new features in Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator. If you missed our blog on private IP address space management check it out now. Today, we’ll be showcasing our widget plugins.
Widget plugins are Flexiant Development Language (FDL) code blocks that enable service providers to create configurable custom widgets that can be placed anywhere in the control panel and display any kind of service provider-driven custom information. These widgets could display content from a variety of sources, examples include:
- Getting started, training or control panel tour videos
- Feeds from social media sites or service status updates
- Blogs, deal of the day or any other kind of service provider’s own content
On top of the widget plugin enablement feature Flexiant has also created, and is shipping as standard, a couple of predefined widget plugins to showcase the feature. As part of our commitment to innovating on behalf of our customers, these widgets were created as a result of requests from Flexiant customers. These plugins include:
- YouTube Widget Plugin
- Twitter Widget Plugin – coming soon!
- Markdown Widget Plugin (for rich text and images) – coming soon!
- Generic Custom Widget Plugin – this plugin can be used to embed generic HTML, JavaScript and CSS without needing to write any FDL code. The possibilities for this are therefore very wide-ranging.
The predefined widget plugin is now included in the standard Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator code base. You can view the source code in the Flexiant Marketplace. You can also use it as a starting point to write yourself other widget plugins that solve similar use cases (e.g. Vimeo instead of Youtube).
What can you do out of the box with predefined Flexiant widget plugins?
Achievable with generic custom widget plugin that Flexiant has written, or writing your own FDL plugin for the below:
- Video sharing (Vimeo, Dailymotion etc)
- Social media (Facebook etc)
- Hosted status pages (statuspage.io etc)
How does this benefit cloud providers? Simply put, if you can offer more value in the Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator control panel you can help improve customer retention by providing a better level of customer service and improved user experience. You can also keep customers engaged by encouraging them to revisit the control panel more frequently. Widget plugins can help you to up-sell services by making it more easy for customers to self-serve your value-added offers, and you tailor widget content to your target markets to help differentiate against the competition.
For your customers, it will be easier to consume and self-serve cloud services, increase productivity and deliver a chance to learn best practices.
Want to see this feature in action? Get in touch and we will give you a short demonstration. If you like what you see, let us know so we can get you benefiting from Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator as soon as possible.
Watch for the next blog on our JavaScript API.
