The Gutenberg team has published a Blocks in Widget Areas RFC (request for comments) document, detailing a technical approach that brings blocks to the wp-admin/widgets.php screen and the Customizer. This is one of the goals on the roadmap Matt Mullenweg outlined in his 9 Projects for 2019 post. Based on (more…)
Gutenberg phase 2 development is underway and one of the first orders of business is porting all existing core widgets to blocks. This task is one of the nine projects that Matt Mullenweg outlined for 2019, along with upgrading the widgets-editing areas in wp-admin/widgets.php and adding support for blocks in (more…)
WordPress 4.8 brought TinyMCE to the core Text widget, along with brand new Image, Video, and Audio media widgets. The upcoming 4.9 release builds on this progress and will introduce some long-awaited improvements to Text widget. Users will finally be able to use shortcodes in the Text widget without the (more…)
The Core Media Widgets feature plugin introduced a gallery widget in the 0.2.0 release this week. WordPress 4.8 added the new audio, image, and video widgets from this feature plugin. The gallery widget is targeted for merge into the upcoming WordPress 4.9 release. In testing the new feature I found (more…)
WordPress 4.8.1 is available for download or as an update from the WordPress Dashboard. This release contains 29 bug fixes and improvements. The most notable addition is a dedicated Custom HTML widget. The Custom HTML widget works similar to the Text widget in WordPress 4.7 and below. To see a (more…)
WordPress 4.8 “Evans” is available for download and is the first major release of the year under the new release cycle. WordPress 4.8 is named after William John “Bill” Evans, an American jazz pianist. New Image, Video, and Audio Widgets WordPress 4.8 includes three new widgets. All three widgets make it easier to display images, (more…)
WordPress 4.8 Beta 1 is available for testing and has a couple of features that will likely have a big impact. New Image, Video, and Audio Widgets WordPress 4.8 has three new core widgets and adds a visual editor to the Text widget. Adding video, audio, or images to text (more…)
Adding images to sidebars in WordPress is a cumbersome task that requires users to upload an image to the Media Library, find the URL, copy it, and paste it into a Text widget along with additional HTML. Nearly two years ago, Mel Choyce opened a ticket on WordPress Trac proposing (more…)
WordPress 4.5 is right around the corner with the first release candidate now available for download. It includes 49 changes from the last beta – improvements to the new custom logo feature, a minor update to jQuery, updates to inline documentation, and fixes for various small bugs. The upcoming release (more…)
The traditional use of widgets in WordPress is to set it and forget it. After placing and configuring a widget, it stays in the widgetized area until manually removed. Many plugins have extended widgets to add visibility settings that are based on the page or post where the widget appears. (more…)
The original Monster Widget plugin is a handy tool created by Automattic to assist theme developers with testing. Essentially, it allows you to quickly drop all core widgets into your sidebar at once, saving you the trouble of having to add them individually. Now you can get the same for (more…)
Developed by Hyyan, Flexible Widget Title is a new plugin that enables users to hide widget titles from the frontend of WordPress. When activated, apply brackets to the titles you want to hide. For example, [A Text Widget Title]. Although the same effect can be accomplished by leaving the title (more…)