Posted 12 January 2012 in Dynamic Widgets

Dynamic Widgets 1.5.0

I have finally released version 1.5.0 of Dynamic Widgets. A lot have been changed, below you’ll find an overview of all the bits and pieces. Two things are major:

  • I’ve moved the system requirements a bit up. You must have at least PHP 5.1 running on your host, also at least WP 3.0.
  • Support for individual Custom Posts have been dropped. It was not reliable compared to the high standards I’m using.

When you upgrade manually, be sure to remove the whole dynamic-widgets directory. Do a fresh copy of this version. Some files have been renamed. Old files remaining might lead to unexpected behaviour.

As usual, below is the complete changelog.

  • Added Pods plugin support.
  • Added Tag Archive Pages support.
  • Added hierarchical inheritance for Categories.
  • Added workaround to detect correct template when using Pods.
  • Added negative exceptions for Role.
  • Added an “Only on first page” exception for Front Page.
  • Added support for BP Group Hierarchy.
  • Added support for bbPress User Profile pages.
  • Added Chinese (Simplified) language files (locale: zh_CN) – xie xie Hanolex!
  • Added Lithuanian language files (locale: lt_LT) – dekoju Liudas!
  • Added a “Save & Return” button to the widget options page.
  • Bugfix for subscribers show up in the author lists in WP > 3.1.
  • Bugfix for Taxonomies in Custom Post Types are not always saved.
  • Bugfix for Custom Posts box is sometimes empty.
  • Fixed several PHP notices about undefined variables.
  • Removed support for individual Custom Posts.
  • Removed PHP4 support, minimum PHP version is now 5.1.0.
  • Removed WP < 3.0 support. Minimum WordPress version is now 3.0.

 

58 Comments to “Dynamic Widgets 1.5.0”

  • Lou Rainaldi
    12 January 2012 at 20:14

    I have just installed your widget on my test system to try showing different widgets on different pages. Once I did that when I had a widget to the side bar and click on the widget to enter text (text widget) the text and title text boxes disappear and can’t be used. If I deactivate Dynamic Widgets everything works again. Any idea what is going on?

    • Jacco
      12 January 2012 at 21:06

      Just hit Save and everything is fine.

  • Chris Covington
    13 January 2012 at 18:01

    I have a site that I would like to add 3 widgets to the bottom of the home page. Does this plugin allow you to assign positions to the widgets as well? Thanks Chris

    • Jacco
      13 January 2012 at 20:11

      Hi Chris,
      I’m sorry, that’s not what DW does. It just shows or hides widgets based on the conditional rules you’ve set.
      Adding space for widgets is something what can be done by adding it to your theme template. I can service this for you on a commercial base.

  • Tammy
    15 January 2012 at 06:41

    First I want to say, I really like dynamic widget. I do have a problem though….

    I just installed your latest update and was wondering if anyone else was having a problem adding more widgets?
    Now when I try add any kind of widget anywhere, the widget box shows up then closes and shows only the delete | close and save links.

    I have to go in and deactivate dynamic widgets then add in the new widget where I want it and add the info., after I save it, I go back and activate dynamic widgets and everything is fine from there. I can use DW as usual.

    Any ideas as to what I can do to keep from having to deactivate dynamic widget when I want to add a new widget?

    If no fix, is there a way to roll back to the previous version without loosing all of my dynamic widget settings?

    any help is appreciated.

    • Tammy
      15 January 2012 at 06:45

      oops sorry, re-read the first comment.

      When the widget closes, hit the save button and it will open back up like it should for adding text.

      Thanks!

      • Jacco
        15 January 2012 at 09:50

        Hi Tammy. Hitting the Save button is a workaround. The latest development version has this bug fixed.

  • Paul Kirtley
    16 January 2012 at 20:33

    Hi

    First I wanted to say I really like Dynamic Widgets. It’s been an extremely useful plug-in for me.

    But I have downloaded the latest version and am having some problems.

    ALL widgets are now showing on one of the pages:

    http://frontierbushcraft.com/frontier-bushcraft-blog/

    Many of these widgets are selected to NOT show on this page.

    This is the only page where I’m having this problem. I suspect it may be because I am not using the blog page as the home page on the site.

    I tried to register this problem under you bug-fix page but it told me the DUMP text file was too large! For your reference, it is 151kb.

    Since I could not log the problem without a DUMP file, commenting this way is the only way I could contact you.

    Thanks in advance for your help.

    Kind regards,

    Paul

    • Jacco
      16 January 2012 at 21:54

      Hi Paul,
      Because of the addition of the “First page” exception on blog (posts) pages, I had to change the way DW interacts with this page. Normally I always try to convert existing configurations to the new situation. Unfortunately this was not possible in a sophisticated and reliable way. That’s why I choose not to perform an automatic conversion during upgrade. You’ll find the new section under ‘Posts page’.

      • Paul Kirtley
        16 January 2012 at 22:25

        Thanks Jacco

        That all worked fine. Thanks for pointing out the ‘Posts Page’ setting.

        Everything is looking tidy again now!

        All the best,

        Paul

        • Jacco
          16 January 2012 at 22:34

          Great to read everything is working now. My apologies you had to do this manually.

  • MarkusM
    17 January 2012 at 16:49

    Hi,

    I was really happy with your plugin so far, but as I’m into the wordpress mutlisite development right now, I was wondering why your plugin is not working on a wp multisite installation.

    Any reason for that?

    regards, M

    • Jacco
      17 January 2012 at 18:09

      HI Markus,
      Yes, there is a reason. DW is not prepared for for a network activation. That needs a few extra functions to be coded into it. It’s on the whishlist for already quite some time. It never had really a priority attached to it. Basicaly because nobody asked for it. Now you did, there will be some priority attached to it. I know however when WP merged the MU into the 3.0 version it was quite a hassle to get a plugin up and running for MU. I have no idea actually if that have been changed.

      • MarkusM
        17 January 2012 at 18:13

        Sounds great, looking forward to your next versions of the plugin!

  • Tim
    18 January 2012 at 06:39

    Hi, thank you for the plug-in!

    I have an issue that when I change the dynamic settings of my template, I receive the following error report (as below) I then proceed to view the results and it appears to have worked OK, it just makes me nervous to receive the warning / error as I think the widget plugin may fail and I’ll have custom menus everywhere except where they’re meant to be!! Is this warning simply that – a warning? Or do i need to do something differently. thank you!
    _________________________________

    Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/bluemoun/public_html/wp-content/plugins/dynamic-widgets/dynwid_admin_save.php on line 158

    Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/bluemoun/public_html/wp-content/plugins/dynamic-widgets/dynwid_admin_save.php:158) in /home/bluemoun/public_html/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 866

    • Jacco
      18 January 2012 at 06:47

      Yes, it’s a warning. Nothing critical. Nothing is lost. But it’s ugly and not meeting my standards, so I fixed the issue in the latest development version.

      • Tim
        18 January 2012 at 06:50

        That was fast! Thank you, I will give the latest dev version a try. Cheers!

      • Tim
        18 January 2012 at 07:00

        Sorry, last question! How do I install the dev version over the current version without uninstalling (and I think losing the settings?) the current version? I’m getting an error that the directory / folder already exists. thank you!

        • Jacco
          18 January 2012 at 07:41

          You can overwrite the files or remove the directory first. Your settings are not lost. Settings are saved to the database. After copying I always recommend to do a deactivate – activate cycle.

  • Neil
    18 January 2012 at 19:44

    Hi. Great work on the plugin. I was wondering if it would be possible to put in check boxes for Internet Explorer 7 and 8 in the next version (currently there are only options for Internet Explorer or Internet Explorer 6). Internet Explorer 6 is the usual problem child, but I tend to have issues specifically with Internet Explorer 8 as well and it would be nice to be able to specifically target IE 8 like you can with IE 6.

    Right now I’m using Dynamic Widgets to hide one widget from IE and display a different, replacement widget that only appears to IE. Only IE 8 needs this treatment, but since there isn’t an option for that I just have to feed it to every version of Internet Explorer. It’s not a huge problem since the other browsers can display either widget correctly, but it would be nice to contain this behavior only to IE 8.

    Again, thanks for the plugin. It allows me to do what I need to do, but I figured I would at least make this request in case you get around to it.

    • Jacco
      18 January 2012 at 20:24

      Yeah, I know. IE 8 is another problem child. Looks like MS always have problems with even version numbers… 😉 I’ll think about adding IE8 to the list.

  • Jasmine
    24 January 2012 at 21:58

    Hi, I want to say that I really enjoy the plugin.

    Recently, I’m having problems with the Dynamic plugin after upgrading my WordPress and plugins. I have custom Posts types in my template and now when I want to change a widget from Static to Dynamic I am unable to select the post under that Post type. Widgets that I had Dynamic I unable to edit them.

    I just get for example Show widget on Services? yes or no. I do not get a selection to choose from as I did in the past.

    Any reason why this might of happened? Does the latest version of your plugin not support custom Post?

    • Jacco
      24 January 2012 at 22:11

      Hi Jasmine,

      Unfortunately I had to drop support for individual Custom Post Types. The system I was using for that was not reliable and not meeting my high standards. I’m working on a way to make it available again. For now support has been removed.

      The general Yes/No for Custom Post Types and Taxonomies within Custom Post Types is still in place.

  • Willimac
    25 February 2012 at 07:54

    Jacco,

    First let me thank you for making this wonderful plugin and offer some of the fastest support I have seen from a WordPress plugin dev. After reading some other entries, I installed 1.5.0.5 in hopes that it would clean things up. The plugin functions as it was designed, but I still get the ugly error code when saving. The settings are saved but the warning is a little jarring.

    Second, on the single page that I have selected the only dynamic widget (SXSW Profiles) to be displayed (http://willimac.com/sxsw) there are two error codes within the sidebar. Screen grab http://cl.ly/EXFZ Any ideas why those error codes are showing up in the sidebar?

    Let me know if you need more info. Thanks!

    • Jacco
      25 February 2012 at 10:16

      Hello Willimac,
      Thanks for the compliments! 🙂
      I just had a look at your screenshots. Fortunately both show the same warning. I also think I’ve found the problem. I’ll have to add a fix and test it out. When it’s ready, I’ll let you know.

      • Willimac
        29 February 2012 at 16:51

        Thanks Jacco!

        Any luck with testing the fix? The conference starts next week.

        • Jacco
          29 February 2012 at 21:35

          Hello Willimac,
          Actually yes! However, I’m working on another fix currently which seems a bit nasty. I think I have everything ready in the weekend.

        • Jacco
          3 March 2012 at 16:30

          Hello Willimac,
          A new development version (1.5.0.6) has just been released.

          • Willimac
            6 March 2012 at 18:30

            Thanks for the update. However, I am still getting a warning in the sidebar for “line 521”. And for each dynamic widget I set it returns the same warning. I even uninstalled, deleted and re-uploaded the DW files. No change. Thanks for taking another look http://willimac.com/sxsw

            Will

          • Jacco
            6 March 2012 at 18:51

            Hmm… that’s weird. I’m going to email you a modified version of dynwid_worker.php Let’s see if that helps.

          • Willimac
            6 March 2012 at 20:15

            You are a genius! Thank you sir.

  • Aminka Ozmun
    3 March 2012 at 15:45

    Quintuplicated Pages in Dynamic Widgets Database??

    Hi, thanks for continuing to develop this plugin. I’ve just encountered what may be my first problem with it!

    Actually, this “problem” doesn’t seem to be affecting anything but it’s very strange: Dynamic Widgets (1.5.0, anyway) lists several of my WordPress pages five times over or more!! It also seems to miss some pages….

    This seems to be the case with every sidebar widget plugin I have, like WP-Flash TagCloud, Random Quote, even WordPress’ own native Links widget!

    Thankfully, my site seems to operate just fine, and I need to check a page just once for Dynamic Widgets to do its magic — but I was wondering whether I should be concerned about all these multi-replicated listings!!

    • Jacco
      3 March 2012 at 16:29

      Hello Aminka,
      You’re not the only one. I have received comments from DW users having the same issue. Unfortunately I have no idea where it comes from. I did change a few things in the development version, mainly about building up the hierarchical tree for Pages. It might ‘fix’ this strange problem also.

      • Aminka Ozmun
        4 March 2012 at 22:55

        Hmm, what development version, please?

        I’ve thought to just delete the plugin and start all over, but apparently the database tables still exist so could you advise as to how I may restore things to a pristine state? I don’t mind redoing my Dynamic Widgets settings at all.

        Thanks for any advice!

        • Jacco
          5 March 2012 at 08:31

          Just the latest development version: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/dynamic-widgets.zip

          When you want to start over again, just do an uninstall of Dynamic Widgets: At the DW overview page, at the bottom, click ‘Advanced’, there you will find a button ‘Uninstall’. This removes everything related to DW.

          • Aminka Ozmun
            5 March 2012 at 19:04

            Thanks, Jacco!

            Just as an FYI: Uninstalling 1.5.0 didn’t help matters, nor uninstalling and deleting and then reinstalling. I even deactivated all other plugins to no avail. But your development version, 1.5.0.6, eliminated the problem!!!

            Can I kiss you??? 😉

            No? Okay, I’ll send a donation then…. =D

            Seriously, thanks so much!! 1.5.0 worked but it was annoying seeing all those instances of the same pages…1.5.0.6 is like the Dynamic Widgets I’d always remembered: straight and to-the-point!

          • Jacco
            6 March 2012 at 18:54

            Hello Aminka,
            LOL! As long as you don’t make my gf jealous. 😉 Great to read everything is working now! 🙂

  • Peter Ingersoll
    9 March 2012 at 21:14

    Hello Jacco,

    I, too, have received the “521” error on pages where I’ve set an exception.

    For example, I’m getting on http://dmtalentnow.com/test-page/ the following:

    Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/dmtalent/public_html/wp-content/plugins/dynamic-widgets/dynwid_worker.php on line 521
    (I’ve left all other pages static).

    I did do an advanced uninstall and have loaded 1.5.0.6. Are there any other things I can try?

    – Peter

    • Jacco
      9 March 2012 at 22:00

      Hello Pater,
      I’ll release the fix for this somewhere next week. I’m currently traveling.

      • Peter Ingersoll
        9 March 2012 at 22:17

        Hello Jacco,

        I look forward to it. Happy travels.

        Cheers.

        – Peter

      • Russell Steyn
        13 March 2012 at 05:47

        Oh Jacco

        I will be so pleased for this fix, as I am having the exact same issue with same symptoms as described by @Peter Ingersoll

        The site I am developing is due for go live end of the month so the timing is perfect.

        Thanks so much
        Russell

        • Russell Steyn
          17 March 2012 at 17:14

          Thank you so much Jacco.

          All good here!

          Much appreciate it.

  • Alastair
    13 March 2012 at 07:05

    Hi Jacco,

    I hope that you will be able to help resolve a minor challenge I am having with DW

    My site is multi-lingual and I have language menus that are assigned language pages and headers that I have created and it all works beautifully

    My problem is with the blog posts as I don’t seem able to assign EN-menu in the sidebar in DW

    I appreciate that this is probaly not a DW issue but more my lack of knowledge with WordPress but any assistance would be greatly appreciated

    • Jacco
      13 March 2012 at 11:22

      Hello Alastair,
      Which multi-lingual plugin are you using?

  • Matthew Ramsden
    2 April 2012 at 21:16

    Hi! First off, thanks for the excellent plugin. I’m using the tags feature to associate some widgets with specific tag archive pages. What I’ve found is that the widgets that appear on a tag archive page seem to depend on the tags associated with the first post, rather than just the one tag that defines the archive. If I’m looking at the tag archive page for XYZ, but the first post on the page happens to be tagged with both XYZ and ABC, I’ll see both the XYZ and ABC associated widgets. I’ve double checked that I didn’t accidentally associate the widgets with multiple tags. I’ve also tested it with several different tags and found the behavior to be consistent. The widgets in question are also associated with one or two pages each, but nothing else tag, or category related.

    If you have any thoughts on the issue, they’d be much appreciated. Thanks again for your work – the plugin is a huge help.

    Cheers
    Matt

    • Jacco
      2 April 2012 at 22:39

      Thank you for your compliments and bug report!
      Would you please try out something for me? Put DW into using OLD method and see if the problem persists…. You can do this by going to the DW overview page, click at the bottom “Advanced” and tick the checkbox for “Use OLD method”.

      • Matthew Ramsden
        2 April 2012 at 22:43

        I set DW to “Use OLD method” but the problem persists.

      • Matthew Ramsden
        2 April 2012 at 23:00

        Hi – I just tired reversing the condition… instead of setting the Tag page option to “NO”, with the exception of the tag I want the widget to appear on, I set the option “YES”, with the exception of every tag BUT the tag I want the widget to appear on. The results were as follows:

        – ABC widget DIDN’T appear on tag pages other than ABC, even if the first post happened to be tagged with ABC
        – the ABC widget also DIDN’T appear on the ABC tag archive page, IF the first post was tagged with more than one term.
        – the ABC widget DID appear on the ABC tag once I added a new test post, that was only tagged with ABC

        Cheers
        Matt

        • Jacco
          3 April 2012 at 08:16

          Ok, great. Thanks for testing, I appreciate that. I think I have some ideas where it might go wrong. I’m going to look into it.

        • Jacco
          6 April 2012 at 17:58

          Hi Matthew,
          I’ve found the bug and fixed it in the latest development version 1.5.1.1.

          • Matthew Ramsden
            7 April 2012 at 17:49

            Thanks!! Much appreciated – i’ll take a look.

  • Mark W.
    16 July 2012 at 18:31

    Hello there,

    Our company is receiving the following notice in the sidebar of our website today, along with malfunctions in the main page slider and the drop-down menus.

    “Notice: Undefined variable: term in /home/endeavor/public_html/wp-content/plugins/dynamic-widgets/dynwid_worker.php on line 520”

    What fixes are available for this error message?

    Thank you!
    -Mark

    • Jacco
      28 July 2012 at 11:36

      Hello Mark,
      First of all a live server environment should in my opinion not show PHP notices. Unfortunately that’s a choice the system administrators make. Anyway, I’ll have a look to it and see if I can fix this notice.

    • Jacco
      29 July 2012 at 12:00

      Hello Mark,
      I think I’ve fixed the issue. When I have my normal internet connection back, I can commit the fix to the next development version.

      • Mark W
        30 July 2012 at 16:42

        Thank you very much for following up on this issue. Our team here is very fond of this plugin, so we’re glad to know that it’s being maintained well!

        -Mark

        • Jacco
          1 August 2012 at 19:39

          Hello Mark,
          As promised, I’ve uploaded the fix to the development version.