Mom Blog Network's Drupal Widget System

Today, we announced the official launch of our new widget and API system for Mom Blog Network, the “sister site” to MothersClick. We’re excited not only because these products are great new features for our users, but they also highlight the successful development of our community application.

As an extension of our custom, Drupal-based white-label solution that powers the ParentsClick Network, our widget system ties in directly to new content being generated across our network of sites. In the case of Mom Blog Network, as moms vote on various posts making them popular, our widget system catches this data and sends it to a custom PHP processing engine that dynamically builds and serves the widgets. The advantage to this system is it allows us to support millions of widgets without invoking Drupal each time to serve them — we like our servers :)

Continue reading on for examples and more…

You can see this widget in action right here:

Pretty nifty, huh? You can grab your own widget over here.

Additionally, we’ve built a simple API that works very similar to Digg. If you head to the integration page, you can see we make it very easy for moms to simply cut and paste code into their blogs, which automatically adds in Mom Blog Network buttons to each of their posts. This tool allows their readers to easily submit and vote for their posts on Mom Blog Network, which allows them to reach a wider audience and drive traffic. You can see a live example of it right here:

Vote for my post please :)

We’re quite pleased with the results, and it’s extremely rewarding to see these widgets starting to pop up around the mommy-blogosphere!