How to create sidebar widgets/modules i.e. embedding the contents of another controller in a view

[eluser]design_shuffle[/eluser]
Hi,

I have been tearing my hair out over this for about 3 hours, please can someone help?

Here is what I want to achieve...

On my home page I wish to have a sidebar widget/module which displays the latest 10 events from the events controller.

I started off trying to use the widget plugin, but could not get my head around it -Plugin widget

Next I read about extending the standard controller to MY_Controller, so in the MY_Controller I added the code from my events controller which retrieves the latest events using the events model, I presume this is the correct place to put this?

##contents of MY_Controller

Code:

function home_events()
   {
      
           // load library
        $this->load->library(array('table','validation','template'));
        
        // load helper
        $this->load->helper('url', 'form');
        
        // load model
        $this->load->model('event_model','',TRUE);
        $this->load->model('location_model','',TRUE);
        
       $data['base'] = $this->config->item('base_url');
        // offset
        $uri_segment = 3;
        $offset = $this->uri->segment($uri_segment);
        
        // load data
        $events = $this->event_model->get_paged_list($this->limit, $offset)->result();
        
        // generate pagination
        $this->load->library('pagination');
        $config['base_url'] = site_url('event/index/');
         $config['total_rows'] = $this->event_model->count_all();
         $config['per_page'] = $this->limit;
        $config['uri_segment'] = $uri_segment;
        $this->pagination->initialize($config);
        $data['pagination'] = $this->pagination->create_links();
        

        // generate table data
        $this->load->library('table');
        $this->table->set_empty(" ");
        $this->table->set_heading('Name', 'Location', 'Date', 'Image', 'Actions');
        $i = 0 + $offset;
        foreach ($events as $event){
            $this->table->add_row($event->name, $event->location, $event->date, $event->image_url,
                anchor('event/view/'.$event->id,'view',array('class'=>'view'))
            );
        }
        $data['table'] = $this->table->generate();
        
     $data['home_events_view']    = $this->load->view('home_events', $tmp_data, TRUE);
     $this->load->view('home', $data);
        }
    //end function home_events

Next in my home view I try and load the home_events_view with the following -

Code:

<?php echo $home_events_view; ?>

When I load the homepage I get the following error -
Message: Undefined variable: home_events_view
Filename: views/home.php

Have I approached this the correct way?, can anyone spot where I have gone wrong?
Im guessing that I need to put something in my home controller to retrieve the events data?

Any help would be appreciated, I have learnt so much lately about codeigniter and I love it, but embedding views has been a big snag!

Thanks Dan