Best Practices for OpenSocial development

1. All gadgets must contain the following attributes:
   • title
   • author
   • author_email
   • description
   • screenshot
   • thumbnail
2. Developers should size gadgets be appropriately to fit within the main WMS panel.
   1. use the width, height and scrolling attributes on the Module element to set size of gadget and enable scrolling

      width="800"
      height="450"
      scrolling="true"
      
      
      

   2. use preferred_height and preferred_width attributes on the Content element to control size of gadget
   3. require the dyanmic-height and dyanmic-width features and use these to automatically resize their gadget
3. Developers should set the view for the gadget to default.
4. Developers should write their gadgets to allow the configuration of API keys (WSKeys) during installation. For more information see : Allowing for API key configuration on Installation
5. Developers using write services MUST build their applications using server side scripting languages and then build an OpenSocial gadget to proxy the application. This requirement is to keep WSKeys and tokens from being openly displayed in the code and thus invalidating their security.  For more information on how to proxy content using OpenSocial please see documentation on : Proxying External Content
6. Developers should try to be use a look and feel which is similar to the container UI by using similar colors, fonts, tabs and buttons.

Additional Resources

• Social Design Best Practices at OpenSocial.org
• Improving Latency at OpenSocial.org