With WordPress 4.8 “Evans“, we welcome 3 new Widgets into the core WordPress offering, along with an update to the basic Text Widget. Here’s a quick demo of how the Widgets look, using the Widgets on Pages plugin to display them in this post. Updated Text Widget Some content using the new text widget. And a link. And some bullets An Image WidgetA PlantUML generated imageAn Audio Widget https://datamad.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Pim-Poy.wavVideo Widget https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2LfCihCqRI We can see here a Text Widget, that has been populated with it’s new visual editor. In the example above I’ve used it to add formatted text, along with a hyperlink. I’ve also used the new Audio Widget to embed a nice audio player. In the example above I’ve populated it with a .wav file that I’d uploaded, but it could also support files linked by URL. The new Video Widget also gives me a nice inline player, and again can be populated from the media library but also from URLs like in the case above where I have referenced a YouTube link. The last widget I’ve used above is the new Image Widget. Power to the Casual Users All-in, these 3 new widgets, and the updated editing experience of the Text Widget, have given a lot of power to casual WordPress users. For a long time authors and site owners have had to “hack” the plain text widget, and use extra plugins to achieve things as simple as adding rich text to their...
Read MoreWell, it was 7 years in the making, but Widgets on Pages has finally made v1 release. Widgets on Pages is the highest rated way to add WordPress widgets and sidebars into both pages and posts, as well as supporting an easy way to add more dynamic sidebars that can be used throughout themes. After some years of very little change I have re-architected the plugin to make use of a more standard Object Oriented structure (based upon the wonderful WordPress Pluign Boilerplate project). This v1 release also moves towards using WordPress custom post types, as storage places for each dynamic sidebar created by the plugin. Although the plugin was untouched for quite some time I did keep an eye on making sure that it was compatible with each WordPress release, and even though I didn’t make any updates it still kept bringing in the 5 star review… so thanks to you all, and the stability of the WordPress internals. It wasn’t all plain sailing As some of you will have seen, the initial bump to version 1.x did indeed land with a bump. I cannot apologise enough. It seems that everyday is a school day… and even though I believed I had thoroughly tested the upgrade from pre v1.X installs I hadn’t. It isn’t a pleasant feeling seeing upgrade issues when you have an active user base of upwards of 70,000 It turns out that my understanding of plugin updates through the WordPress.org repo doesn’t work as I thought it did. I managed to reduce the number of users that were impacted, and, thanks to the effort of users posting to the support forum, I was able to debug what was up and get some quick fixes in and rollback the stable version. I can tell you now that it isn’t a pleasant feeling see upgrade issues when you have an active user base of upwards of 70,000. If you are interested then this article covers how plugin updates are handled. Onwards… onwards The updated structure and use of CPT was put in place to allow an easier route to delivering some more of the items on the roadmap for Widgets on Pages… and I hope that you...
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