Would like "widgets" for use on my own adoption site

[mmroberts]

I am a subscriber to the data management and web site services but do not use the web site for my primary public point of contact, opting instead to use it as an internal management tool for all of our volunteers. For many reasons that are not pertinent to this post, we want a level of control and flexibility that we don't have if we use the hosted web site.

However, there are many features in the web site that would be useful on my rescue web site that I am currently having to duplicate with my own database and application code on my own web server. I would very much like to have access to these things in the same way that I have access to animal lists through the portal toolkit. This would allow my web site to always be current based on the data in my RescueGroups database.

I know it would be counter-productive to offer all of the features of the web site through the portal toolkit, but the way things are set up it appears that it is either all or "almost" nothing with web site elements. What I would love to see (for paying web site customers) is a way to embed individual items in my own web site much as I currently do with animal lists.

Things I have an immediate need for to eliminate duplication of code and data are:

Photo Album
Individual pet display (like the Featured Pet item in the web sites), filterable by either ID or random animal.
Ability to list sponsored pets.
Events lists and details
VERY MUCH NEEDED --> Online forms <---

I know that the obvious answer is "we already supply those things in our web site service". That is great and really impressive for people who want a turnkey solution. But that does not work well for me. I need a set of tools that I can seamlessly integrate into my existing web site like the animal lists that the toolkit gives.

To put it a little differently...

The toolkit's pet list is great because I can drop some code into any web page, set some parameters, and have a real-time list of animals that are in my database. It is very well written and extremely useful. But how useful would it be if it also delivered menus, headers, footers, Featured Pet, etc. every time I used it? The obvious answer is "not very".

This is why I think we need the equivalent of the animal list for ALL major web site elements. I need to have the individual components available without all of the additional web site information included. Right now when I want one of my website visitors to fill out an adoption form, I have to either send them to my RescueGroups account (which is confusing to them and does not blend well with my existing site), or embed it in an iframe which really gets odd because they get all of the graphics, menus, and everything for the entire web site.

I think making these "widgets" available through the toolkit to web site customers will turn out to be extremely useful to the more technical users who are locked into their current web site. It will allow developers to seamlessly integrate the data that they are paying to have hosted on the servers into their own web sites.

Please let me know what you think of this idea.

M@