Widget Pack 2.0 Update Preview: The Category Widget

The Widget Pack is one of the more popular extensions for Connections because it adds many useful widgets that can be added to the theme’s sidebar. I’ve been working on a massive update to all the currently available widgets, implementing all the most requested features. Here’s an overview of the new features you can expect when Widget Pack 2.0 is released.

The two most requested features were to be able to hide the entry count and hide empty category (categories) which have no entries assigned to them. Both of these can be done now and it’s as easy as simply checking a box.

The next most requested feature is to be able to exclude specific categories. This can now be done but first…

You can choose to display “All” categories, which is how the widget currently works, or you can choose  “Include or exclude specific categories.” or choose to only “Display specific category parent.” Depending on which option you choose you’ll be presented with a different set of options.

When you choose to display all categories you can choose to limit how “deep” into the category tree to display. By default this is set to 0 which means the entire category tree will be shown. Setting this to 1 would show only the top level root parent categories. Setting this to 2 would show only the top level root parent category and their immediate children categories and setting it to 3 would show the children’s children categories and so on and so on.

Now, as requested, not only can you chose to exclude specific categories you also choose to display only specific categories. When you choose this option you’ll be presented with a searchable category drop down which can be used select the categories.

• If you choose the exclude categories, this will also exclude the categories descendants.
• If you choose to include specific categories, only the categories that are chosen will be displayed. The children categories, if there are any, will automatically be excluded.

Lastly you can choose to a display only a specific category parent and whether or not only its children should be displayed or all of its descendants. This feature will be useful to those who want to show just a specific branch in the category tree.

Since the category widget is multiple instance compatible, meaning you can use it more than once in a single sidebar or in multiple sidebars at once or both, you can configure each instance uniquely to get the display just the way you want. You could even use a plugin like Widget Logic or Conditional Widgets or Restrict Widgets (after this bug is fixed) to get really fine control of when and how the category widget is displayed.

All the other widgets also received significant feature enhancements as well as the inclusion of several new widgets. I’ll be going over these in upcoming posts.