I built a set of plugins so that a member who is logged in with the remote facility is recognized (from a session cookie) and logged into our Joomla site silently.

I would like to create a button and put it in the header of each component. I can think of several ways to do this, but I am trying to come up with an approach that fits the overall Joomla operation.

What I had in mind was to create a module that displays a login button, which in turn invokes the remote login and return url if the viewer is not logged in and displays a similar logout button with a link to the global sign off url if they are logged in. The button itself would be placed using your ModulesAnywhere (which I installed earlier today).

The straightforward way to use a module with logic to display the correct button seems to be "against the rules" since the php code gets stripped if I try to enter the code using the Joomla editor.

I could not find any tutorials that talk about how to create modules that function as widgets like this.

If this is worth a discussion, I would like to hear other's thoughts on the subject.

All modules work like widgets. But you are probably trying to use the Custom HTML module to create your own module.
That is not the way.

You will have to make a module from scratch with actual php files and such. Then you can place that module in any module position you want.

You don't need Modules Anywhere for that.

I was trying to use the custom html module and, of course, it did not work. I take it one goes about modules the same way as plugins. The plugins I wrote have no real rendering elements in them, so it is a bit of a jump to understand how to use the structure to generate a module.

What module would you recommend I use for an example to create an action button module? I could not find any that work like I want. We are using JaTrona templates and there is a button hard coded into the front page template. I could hack that button, but I want to do it "right."