Drag and drop widgets page for Drupal 6

For one of the projects had to find Drupal 6 module which gives you the functionality similar to iGoogle or Netvibes, where each authenticated user can design his/her own homepage (within your page) filled with portlets or widgets of his/her own choice.

It seemed like very cool functionality. I was sure the productive and innovative Drupal community came up with out-of-the-box module which does exactly that. The first link I found was this post with an example of frontend which looks pretty nice with drag drop functionality. The author even includes download, but unfortunately it’s only compatible with Drupal 4…

Then I found MySite module which has very promising functionality including not only Drupal based widget content but also Google Gadgets. The project site states however that MySite module works only with Drupal 5 and in Drupal 6, this module is being replaced by the Dashboard project. On the website of Dashboard project however the first thing you read is “Dashboard is being developed for Drupal.org as prototyped. It will work for all sites, but not yet.” Dead end.

But my huge believe in Drupal community didn’t let me to give up so easily… And then I found Home Box and it's long list of features:

• Create as many home box pages that you need
• Each home box pages as its own access permissions by role (ex: authenticated user, contributors, webmasters, etc.)
• Users can enable/disable each block
• Users can collapse each block
• Each user action is saved in the background through Ajax (user doesn't even see it happen)
• Users can set color for each block (colors are defined per home box pages)
• Can be used with Color picker module to set block colors
• Plays nicely with Views 2 and its exposed Ajax filters
• Views 2 exposed filters are saved (even if user logs out and come back later)
• Tested on Safari, Firefox, Chrome, IE 6, IE 7
• Integrates with Path module so you can choose any URL alias for each home box page
• Respects Drupal permissions' system (block restricted to certain roles aren't rendered for others)
• Based on Drupal Block system, so anything that is a block can be used on such a page
• Code is pretty clean and respects Drupal coding standards (checked with Coder module)
• Comes with documentation through the excellent Advanced help module

Very easy to install and use without much need of tutorials. The fact it uses only block content and no external widgets doesn't really bother me that much. With all the freedom of building customized blocks you have quite a lot extra functionality.

Still taking my time to go deeper in it’s actual functionality, but from what I saw till now, it looks like module with lot’s of potential.