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I know that is kind of a broad and vague question for the title, but in an effort to throw together a demo site for potential clients, I have come up with a question about how articles and custom HTML blocks can contain other widgets. For example I have a page with jPlayer in it. My work around has been to have a mod_custom override that decoded the html so I can included it within script tags, but this doesn't seem to be a very elegant solution. I have some other things like clickable thumbnails that I need to implement as well.

Is the only other option to write a custom extension for each and every thing that isn't straight html/css?

The short answer is yes. Now, it sounds A LOT worse then it actually is. For the most part, I write an accompanied module to display my components data 90% of the time. If you look at DJ Image Slider, a popular free slideshow program, there is an admin view component to manage slideshow categories and images, then a module, which takes the data managed in the back end by the administrator and formats/displays in chosen module position.

A basic module can consist of about 4 files:

mod_mymod.xml - Manifest file
mod_mymod.php - Controller
helper.php - Populates data for view
tmpl/default.php - Displays data for view

It probably takes me about 5 minutes to copy/paste and edit a template module to work with a component. The only real "programming" I do involves the data retrieval in the helper.php and the layout in the default.php.

Of course, you can might want to add css, js, or other files for extra functionality and/or design; but in the end this is the best way to display custom component data. Can I ask what data your extension deals with? I've found a lot of times I can use existing modules and alternative layouts to accomplish things I used to write custom extensions for.