W00t! Version 1.3 of Widgets on Pages has just dropped for PRO users, and will be released to the WordPress.org repo shortly. There might be a couple of bug fixes, but the real deal is the new PRO feature of header/footer auto-inserts. Here’s an example of it in use with WordPress’ TwentySixteen theme, to show a search bar and recent posts in the footer. With the new release users can set a Turbo Sidebar to be automatically inserted into your theme’s header of footer section. This can be particularly useful for themes that don’t have widget areas in the headers and footers out-of-the-box. Setting this up is done through the Turbo Sidebar admin screen, like this; Other release updates include a small update to the Turbo Sidebar admin screen, allowing quick copying of the shortcode… of course PRO users can use the button in the visual editor. We hope you enjoy the update, and feedback to us how you get on....
Read MoreTwentySeventeen has been a hugely successful and adopted theme for WordPress blogs and sites. And that certainly has to do with it’s customiser options, including the ability to set static homepage areas. In doing so, you can unwittingly remove some very useful features from your users. For example on my personal blog I have set a static homepage up, that has the “2 column” width, with recent blog posts being listed underneath. Whilst I really like this layout, it does means that I have lost the standard sidebar, and along with it some useful widgets, such as a search option. In the video below I demonstrate how I can re-add these features in, using Widgets on Pages. I also show how I can use the new “Auto Insert” feature of the Pro version to include certain widgets at the end of each blog post. Video Transcript In this video we’re going to enhance our 2017 themed WordPress blog, with a few widgets and plugins… with a secondary aim of not having to touch any code. This will give our site extra functionality, useful to the user, but also provides hooks to try and increase the time the user spends on our site. I’ll be using my own site toddhalfpenny.com as a demo, and you can see a quick demo here. I have used the customizer to set a static front page, and then also used the next content part to list my recent blog posts. Since I have done this I’ve lost my sidebar, but I want to include some functionality that sidebars give me, namely widgets. Functionality I’d like includes “search“ and maybe a link to a featured / stick post. Another feature I’d like to add is some hooks at the end of each blog post to try to engage with the user, in my case I’m wanting to add “featured / sticky posts” links. For me to achieve what I want, without having to code anything, I’m going to add a couple of plugins to my site. Firstly a “posts-in-sidebar” which will enable us to create widgets for our sticky posts. This is a 5 star plugin with a 10 active installs… though it does not...
Read MoreThat’s right folks. v1.2 of Widgets on Pages Pro is here, with the shiny new addition of being able to select “Auto Insert” options for Turbo Sidebars, to automatically add sidebars and widgets to posts and pages. The plugin enables you to append widgets to WordPress posts and pages, with the option to either have the widgets displayed before, or after, the post or page content. You can specify whether the widgets should automatically be inserted into Posts, Pages, or both, and a new meta-box appears on the individual post/page editing screen to allow you to disable the auto-inclusion on a per content basis. This new feature is perfect for adding hooks into your site, for your users. Examples include adding a “recent post” listing to the base of posts, adding a newsletter sign-up to the end of pages, or even adding a notice box to the top of all content highlighting some important temporary information (e.g. Emergency closing hours of your shop, or a security update for your online...
Read MoreThe recent release of v1.1.0 of Widgets on Pages brought in a few fixes, for stability and upgrade paths… but most exciting is the inclusion of the visual editor support in our PRO version. Inserting widgets into posts… …It is as simple as “drags, drops, and clicks” The below video shows just how smart this is, and that an author, with a few simple “drags, drops, and clicks”, can insert widgets inline into their posts, and even align them horizontally. https://youtu.be/w2LfCihCqRI As well as adding widgets and sidebars directly into post content, you can also use the plugin’s template tags to automatically include the sidebars into your theme. This, along with the ability to create as many sidebars as you want – through a familiar WordPress interface – means that this is also a super easy way to add sidebars to your themes. So what are you waiting for, start making your Widgets work for you. Check out Widgets on Pages ...
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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