How to Fully Customize Your Community with Higher Logic Vanilla’s Widget Builder

If you’ve ever needed a developer to tweak something on your community — and then waited days or weeks for it to happen — Widget Builder gives you a faster, cleaner way to get it done.

It gives you more control. It gives your developers better tools. And it brings flexibility to your community layout and design without relying on plugins, workarounds, or escalations.

Customization has always been a tradeoff

You want your community to reflect your brand visually and functionally. But even small changes often require:

• Waiting on your dev team to make a change
• Explaining exactly where and how you want something to look different
• Hoping it doesn’t break something else in the process

And if you don’t have a dedicated community developer, customization becomes a backlog, or worse, a blocker.

Widget Builder is built for those moments when what’s built-in is solid but not quite what you need.

How Widget Builder works

Higher Logic Vanilla includes a robust library of 50+ prebuilt widgets, from carousels and even blocks to banners and calls to action. For many use cases, these work right out of the box.

But when you need something more specific—a layout that reflects your brand more closely or functionality that isn’t supported by default—Widget Builder gives you that flexibility.

It’s a fully integrated development environment inside Higher Logic Vanilla. Developers can:

• Start with templates based on existing widgets
• Or build entirely custom widgets using React, TypeScript, and scoped CSS
• See changes in live preview as they build
• Save safely with built-in version control

Once a widget is ready, the admin can drop it onto any page, adjust how it looks, and configure who sees it.

Why community managers should care

Even if you’re not writing code, Widget Builder still improves your workflow. It lets your team:

• Move faster: Developers build once; you reuse and configure as needed
• Stay on brand: Tweak layouts and components without breaking theme consistency
• Add functionality: Need a special post layout or a help box? You don’t need a plugin or custom theme. You can drop in a widget.
• Avoid back-and-forth: Configure placement, visibility, and styling directly in Layout Editor once the widget is built.

What your developer will want to know

Here’s what you can tell your developer or send them this section directly.

Widget Builder gives developers a modern coding experience right inside the platform:

• Code with React + TypeScript
• Work directly with HTML, JavaScript, and scoped CSS
• Use live preview with no deploy cycle, no local environment needed
• Get full access to Vanilla’s proprietary methods through its utils library
  • These methods provide access to community specific functions that return community specific meta data like post content, badge information, and even permission sets defined by your admin team. We also provide hooks into your admin defined theme variables so you can make the custom widget extensible and configurable by your admin team without having to create a dev ticket.
• Upload files and assets (images, preview data, etc.)
• Import third-party libraries or APIs (like Chart.js, Statuspage, etc.)
• Track and roll back changes with built-in version control

Once the widget is published, admins can configure styling, roles, and visibility without re-involving the dev team.

How it compares to other platforms

Other community platforms say they support customization, but in practice, it often comes with tradeoffs:

• Widget logic is limited to what’s built-in
• Custom components require a proprietary dev framework or partner involvement
• Layout changes go through professional services
• You can tweak content and styling, but not the behavior or logic of widgets
• There’s no way to preview changes live
• External API integrations require off-platform dev work, if they’re supported at all
• No access to key system-level data like user roles, content permissions, or activity metadata

Widget Builder takes a different approach.

You don’t need to step outside the platform, submit a ticket, or compromise between flexibility and maintainability.

Ready to see it in action? Schedule a demo to see how it can streamline customization for your team.