Time to Re-Grouplet
| Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 | --Sean |
Yahoo! Groups has continued to expand their Grouplets suite with the addition of eight new varieties: Address Book, Birthday List, Favorites, For Sale, Give Away, Group Profile, Jobs, and Places Map. Their intial foray into these mini embeddable group "applications", the People Map, was cute but seemed a bit more limited in appeal, while these new guys are extremely general-purpose and useful, especially once you peek under the covers.
At a high level, Grouplets are just another way to organize information about your group -- they all seem to be list/entry based, and you have the option to view all of them in a Map, Table, or List view -- but they do provide a structured way for users of your group to input the data, based on the particular template. That's all well and good, but the real fun happens when you notice the Settings option on your Grouplet. If you start messing with the Form Settings, you quickly realize that you have complete control over which form elements users can interact with on that Grouplet. My Birthday Grouplet now requires an Address and instead of entering a Birthday, I'm asking for a Monkey. You know, just because I can. It actually seems like a really powerful editor that I was exceptionally surprised to find lurking beneath the stock templates.
If you have a group, definitely try messing around with some Grouplets in the Grouplet manager -- append /grouplets/manager to your group URL (eg, something like: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/YOUR_GROUP_NAME/grouplets/manager). They're still quite beta, but in an exciting, think-of-the-possibilities way.