Today we are very proud to release Widgetkit 1.0, finally! We kept Widgetkit in BETA status for a long time now. This was because we wanted to wait till our website relaunch to provide a great Widgetkit product site with examples and a comprehensive documentation.

And here we go! Visit the Widgetkit product pages:

• Learn more about the features.
• See Widgetkit examples in action.
• Download it and take it for a test drive.
• Read the documentation to start customizing.

Widgetkit has been around for 6 weeks now and during this time a lot has happened. First we like to thank everyone who tried the Widgetkit betas and has send us feedback. We really appreciate it! Until today we have released 5 betas including bugfixes, optimizations and new widgets. Here are some notable features we've added so far: translations, RTL support, editor support for Joomla's TinyMCE and JCE, caption support for slideshows and HTML5 video playback in the lightbox. With the upcoming release of Joomla 1.7 on 19. July 2011, we've also updated Widgetkit to support the latest 1.7 version as well. This makes Widgetkit work perfectly on Joomla 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 and the latest Wordpress 3.2. Here is an overview of all the new widgets we've added since the first beta release:

We are proud to finally announce the first release of Widgetkit our next generation tool set. Widgetkit is the successor of the famous YOOtools we first introduced in January 2008. Back then the YOOtools were only built to work with Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.0 (for those who remember the old times) and until today enriched countless websites. As time flies by so fast in the web, our tools aged and were due for a major update. So we started working on a new version of our tools back in August 2010, right after we finished our work on the Warp 5.5 theme framework.

When we started we basically had two choices, the easy one would be to take each YOOtool and update it's code to work with our default JavaScript library jQuery and keep everything else. Each tool would still require you to use Joomla articles to fill their content. This seems like a reasonable approach, but we thought if we have the opportunity to re-design the tools what can we do differently now to make them even better. We also wanted to achieve compatibility with Joomla 1.6 and to make them available for WordPress. Giving all this a lot of thought, we came up with great ideas which are now implemented in Widgetkit. With Widgetkit we created a whole new concept to make the tools easier to use, install, update and extend.