Widget in CodeIgniter 3

Question

For a dashboard-app, I want to create a widget-component in my CI3-project. I found a similar question: How to create a widget system in Codeigniter, but it seems that this is either outdated or just not usable for CI3. Even the link with the "more information" results in a 404.

I googled that of course, but didn't find anything useful. One post was from 2013, which showed that example von the CI2 base.

However, maybe this plugin still works and I have an error in my setup.

I placed a file "Widget.php" in

/application/third_party/

with the following content:

class Widget
{
    public $module_path;

    function run($file) {        
        $args = func_get_args();

        $module = '';

        /* is module in filename? */
        if (($pos = strrpos($file, '/')) !== FALSE) {
            $module = substr($file, 0, $pos);
            $file = substr($file, $pos + 1);
        }


        list($path, $file) = Modules::find($file, $module, 'widgets/');

        if ($path === FALSE) {
            $path = APPPATH.'widgets/';
        }

        Modules::load_file($file, $path);

        $file = ucfirst($file);
        $widget = new $file();

        $widget->module_path = $path;

        return call_user_func_array(array($widget, 'run'), array_slice($args, 1));    
    }

    function render($view, $data = array()) {
        extract($data);
        include $this->module_path.'views/'.$view.EXT;
    }

    function load($object) {
        $this->$object = load_class(ucfirst($object));
    }

    function __get($var) {
        global $CI;
        return $CI->$var;
    }
} 

In my application/widgets-folder, I have a file called News.php.

<?php

class News extends Widget
{
    function run() {
        die('here');
    }
} 

In application/libraries/ I placed a file widgetlib.php :

<?php
if (!defined('BASEPATH'))
    exit('No direct script access allowed');
class widgetlib {
    function __construct() {
        include(APPPATH . '/third_party/Widget.php');
    }
}

and finally, in my view:

<?php widget::run("News"); ?>

Then I checked my autoloader-class in application/config/autoload.php:

$autoload['libraries'] = 
    'session',
    'database',
    'widgetlib'
);

This results in:

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Error

Message: Class 'Modules' not found

Filename: third_party/Widget.php

Line Number: 20

and

Severity: Runtime Notice

Message: Non-static method Widget::run() should not be called statically, assuming $this from incompatible context

Filename: views/index.php