Configuring widget defaults

In Yii, code pieces commonly used in views are placed into widgets. For example, a widget can render a tag cloud or provide a custom form input type. Core widgets are highly configurable and are used in views as follows:

<?$this->widget('CLinkPager', array(
'pages' => $pages,
'pageSize' => 15,
))?>

In the preceding code, we are using $this->widget that calls a CLinkPager widget with an array of parameters to display a pagination. pages and pageSize are both assigned to the corresponding public properties of the CLinkPager widget before it is rendered.

Note that we have changed the count of items per page to 15 in our example. If we want our pagination to display 15 items per page on all pages of our application, then we will need to provide a pageSize parameter with a value of 15 for all CLinkPager widget calls. Is there a better way? Definitely, yes.