Improved custom widgets

[gristlabs]

Improved custom widgets

[paulfitz]

Grist custom widgets have been improved in the following ways:

• A standard set of widgets are available from a dropdown (for self-hosted Grist, set GRIST_WIDGET_LIST_URL to https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-widget/releases/download/latest/manifest.json to get our set).
• Widgets have an improved UI for mapping columns and for saving configuration, see https://support.getgrist.com/widget-custom/#column-mapping and https://support.getgrist.com/widget-custom/#widget-options
• The grist object used in widgets to access data is now documented more systematically, see https://support.getgrist.com/code/
• There is a documented way to modify tables, not just read from them, see https://support.getgrist.com/code/modules/grist_plugin_api/#selectedtable
• The grist-widget repo gives a way to develop a widget with automatic reload, see https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-widget#developing

@dumblob simple, built-in hosting is a good idea, as is a marketplace. I'm closing this round of improvements, but I don't expect it to be the last :-).

[dumblob]

My preliminary vision 😉:

The docker image (and thus also your online SaaS cloud platform) shall provide a dead-simple way to host static custom widgets.

Reasons:

1. It makes the platform easier to manage (nobody wants to manage a separate web server or add something to their existing web servers) and less dependent on the surrounding (incl. outages, etc.).
2. Make it more secure as trusting you is better than trusting you and one more provider of web server.

Btw. this way you can easily add a button "publish to app/widget market place" (which for now can be just a simple script pushing it to the github widget repo) and symmetrically provide a thumbnail listing of published widgets (as a result of federative collaboration of Grist instances on the internet) to allow quick & easy search & deploy by one click (after confirming a warning it's an untrusted source code not affiliated with https://www.getgrist.com/ ).