I just took a look now at this. The thing is that widgets that transmit values over channels can have their values set over the same channels. So you never need to use value(0), instead you can just do something like this:
instr 1
kTrigreset changed chnget:k("buttonchan")
if kTrigreset==1 then
chnset k(0),"vslider"
endif
endin
Another thing to note is that you cannot update a slider’s range once it has been declared. This is down to the fact that VST hosts need to know the range of the parameters when plugins first load. Changing them after they have been opened will result in unexpected behaviour in the host.
p.s. I can see that settings a widgets value with a string might seem like an intuitive solution. I wonder if I should add support for it…it might be simple, on the other hand, it may not!