Widgets are a great way to provide more useful and context sensitive information for your user community. Zoho Discussions offers a number of pre-defined widgets, which enable you to share important announcements, promote top contributors, drive traffic to the most popular topics and more.

All Forums: The All Forums widget helps to show your users the list of forums available in your online community.
Private Forums: The Private Forums widget helps you to display the forums that are configured as private. Only the corresponding forum members can see the private forum widget.
Announcements: The announcements widget helps to display the announcements that are posted in your community.
Most Popular: The Most Popular widget helps you to share the topics that hold a maximum number of votes.
Activity Chart: This particular widget is user-specific and it shows the overall portal activities.
Most Discussed: The Most Discussed widget lists the important topics that have maximum responses.
Top Contributors: The Top Contributors widget displays the list of users who have posted a maximum number of topics/responses in your online community.
Sticky Posts: The sticky posts show the list of sticky posts available in your portal.

Create Custom Widgets

In addition to the default widgets, Zoho Discussions enables you to create custom widgets and add it to your online community. The custom widgets can be HTML and Link Widgets.

HTML Widgets

HTML Widgets helps you to embed any HTML object into your online community. You can embed the code of specific objects, images, iframe etc., related to your product or service. For Example: You can add the SIGN UP link of your product. This allows your customers to sign up to your product directly from the forum, without having to enter your product website.

To create HTML Widgets:

Go to Settings section.
Select the Widgets tab under Portal settings from the left side menu.
Click on Add HTML Widget button from the right-side menu.
Enter the Widget Name, Description and the HTML Code in the corresponding text-boxes. See image below
Click on Save.
The HTML widget gets created and added to your portal automatically.

Link Widgets

Link widgets can be used to promote your products or services and allow your visitors to make the most use of it.. You can add any links such as Website URL, blog URL, support URL etc., which help your users to access your service quickly and efficiently.

To create Link Widgets:

Go to Settings section.
Select the Widgets tab under Portal settings from the left side menu.
Click on Add Quick Links button section from the right-side menu.
Enter the Link Name and the URL in the corresponding text-boxes. See image below
Click on Save.
The quick link widget gets created and added to your portal automatically.

Manage Portal Widgets

Once you have created your custom widgets, you can rearrange their positions to specify how widgets will be ordered within the widget area.

To rearrange widgets:

Go to Settings > Portal > Widgets.
Click on Manage Widgets tab.
Change the order of the widgets by dragging/dropping the required widget listed in Selected Widgets column. See image below.
The order of the widgets get updated according to the position selected.

To edit and delete custom widgets:

Go to Settings > Portal > Widgets.
Click on HTML Widgets tab.
This displays the list of HTML widgets that you have created.
Select the required widget that you would like to update and click on Edit.
Select the required widget that you would like to remove and click on Delete.
Follow the same procedure to edit/delete the Link Widgets.