Preconfigured Magento Widgets

Is there a UI or programatic system for taking advantage of the "Preconfigured Widget" functionality that's part of Magento's CMS page rendering?

When adding a widget to a CMS page, the code that renders that widget is located in the template directive processing class. This code

File: app/code/core/Mage/Widget/Model/Template/Filter.php
class Mage_Adminhtml_Cms_PageController extends Mage_Adminhtml_Controller_Action
{
    ...
}

When loading a Widget's paramaters, there the following bit of code

// validate required parameter type or id
if (!empty($params['type'])) {
    $type = $params['type'];
} elseif (!empty($params['id'])) {
    $preconfigured = Mage::getResourceSingle开发者_JAVA技巧ton('widget/widget')
        ->loadPreconfiguredWidget($params['id']);

    $type = $preconfigured['type'];
    $params = $preconfigured['parameters'];

} else {
    return '';
}

This code appears to parse a widget directive tag for an id value

{{widget name="foobazbar" id=""}}

and then load the configuration from a widget model

public function loadPreconfiguredWidget($widgetId)
{
    $read = $this->_getReadAdapter();
    $select = $read->select();
    $select->from($this->getMainTable())
        ->where($this->getIdFieldName() . ' = ?', $widgetId);
    var_dump((string)$select);
    $widget = $read->fetchRow($select);
    if (is_array($widget)) {
        if ($widget['parameters']) {
            $widget['parameters'] = unserialize($widget['parameters']);
        }
        return $widget;
    }
    return false;
}

When I first encountered this code, I assumed it was loading up a Widget Instance model. However, it's not. Instead it's loading data from a widget/widget class, which corresponds to the widget table.

mysql> describe widget;
+------------+------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field      | Type             | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+------------+------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| widget_id  | int(10) unsigned | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| code       | varchar(255)     | NO   | MUL | NULL    |                |
| type       | varchar(255)     | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| parameters | text             | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
+------------+------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

Is there a UI or system for adding data to this table? Does anyone (who works fro Magento Inc. or not) know if this is a supported feature, or if it's the start of something that's been abandoned, but left in for backward compatibility reasons?

---

This answer is somewhat off-topic, but I'm not sure if it might satisfy your need anyway. I've discovered that you can create widget instances in the admin CMS>Widgets section, and then render them via the following code:

$oWidget = Mage::getModel('widget/widget_instance')->load('HomepageTwitter','title');
$oWidgetBlock = Mage::app()->getLayout()->createBlock($oWidget->getType(), $oWidget->getTitle(), $oWidget->getWidgetParameters());
echo $oWidgetBlock->toHtml();

Note that the block is loaded by title (rather than arbitrary ID), and that the widget parameters are passed for the Block to render.

---

Per several comments, and private emails, it appears this is a privatish feature for the Magento core team, and has nothing to do with Instance Widgets.