Featured Category Widget

The Plugin

Next to the Category Column that we really needed and still use here and the Advanced Category Column that would better be called „enhanced“ and just is a version with more functionality of Category Column, now there is a fifth in the family: The Featured Category Widget.

Just like the Featured Post Widget, which is still in use here as well, and all it’s derivates it can put certain posts in the focus. But instead of choosing a post you choose a category from which the post should come. If you don’t want to use the post excerpt, you can use either the first sentences of the post or just a couple of words.

Then you can choose the number of posts to display and the offset (number of posts that don’t show in the beginning of the loop), ready.

As with all our plugins, we try to write them ‚afap‘ (as foolproof as possible). Should you still discover some mistakes or have some issues, just leave a comment.

Current Version

The current Version of the Featured Category Widget is 1.7.

Changelog

1.7 streamlined code and loads of new features added (alignment of thumbnails, possibility to show the date and more)
1.6 adjustments in the framework and some more customizing was asked
1.5 You can link the widget title to the displayed category now
1.4 Possibility to change the width of the thumbnail added; small bug fixed
1.3 Small bugfix in auto excerpt
1.2 Complete code overhaul;hooks into the Ads Easy Plugin if Google AdSense Tags are in use
1.1 Possibility to choose random posts
1.0 Initial release

Installation

Simply download the plugin here, unzip it and upload the folder ‚category-feature-widget‘ to the plugins-folder of your WP installation. Then activate the Featured Category Widget and start using it.

Screenshots

Featured Category Widget
The widget in our testing environment
Featured Category Widget
Settings of the widget

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Donation

If you use the plugin and like it, we appreciate a donation. If you find the plugin useful and like it very much, we appreciate your feedback even more.

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33 Gedanken zu “Featured Category Widget

  1. Hallo Reinhold,

    danke für den Kommentar. Leider kann ich dir momentan nicht sagen, woran das liegt. Ich werde aber gegen Ende des Jahres mal alle meine Plugins überarbeiten bzw. für obsolet erklären und aus dem Verkehr ziehen. Dann werde ich hoffentlich auch den Fehler beheben können.

    Lieben Gruß,
    Stefan

  2. Umgebung:
    WP: 5.4–de_DE
    PHP: 7.3/7.4
    Featured Category Widget: Version 2.5
    https://philosophy-at-work.eu
    Google Chrome: kein Fehler
    Safari: 13.1: Fehler: Warning: A non-numeric value encountered in /www/htdocs/w008e9eb/intomycloud/wp-content/plugins/category-feature/class-lib/CF_WidgetClass.php on line 283

  3. Hi, I have used this plugin for a while now but I recently found that when I go to /page/page2 of my website, the widget title remains… but the featured posts are nowhere to be found.

    Is there a fix or setting to change this?

  4. Hi Jason and sorry for a late answer.

    And again sorry, you cannot remove the thumbnail from the widget at the moment. In other plugins of mine you could make it disappear, but here… I’m busy going through my plugins at the moment and will build in that feature.

    Best,
    Stefan

  5. Hi Tom,

    I don’t know exactly, what you mean by the header of the widget. However, there is an h3 element on top of the widget which contains a span element with the link to the category inside of it.

    In CSS you would address that one with the selector [id^="featured_category_widget"].widget_featured_category_widget h3.widgettitle

    Then there’s another h3 element in the widget, which is the posttitle. This one you would address with the CSS selector [id^="featured_category_widget"].widget_featured_category_widget h3

    All of this you cannot do in the CSS section of the plugin’s settings but you need to write them into a style sheet.

    I hope, it helped.

    Best,
    Stefan

  6. How might I go about changing the color of the text in the header of the widget?
    I need it to be white type in a red field. The red field is built into the theme.
    Please see the installed plugin in the sidebar at http://www.fanboyfun.com
    Thanks.
    –t

  7. We are using a custom post type page and your plugin does not have option to enable view for these pages.

    We added is_archive() option to validate for all archive pages also our custom post type too.

  8. Hey Magnus,

    in your case it would help to write somewhere in one of the stylesheets of yours the following class:

    .widget_featured_category_widget h4 {
    text-decoration: underline;
    }

    Regards,
    Stefan

  9. Thanks, the Excerpt seems to leave the link with the correct checked box just not if I am displaying just the post. I have tried with and without Check to keep the layout of the post (all tags and spaces) being checked.

  10. Hi Tom,

    I’ll have to take a closer look to the plugin again, to see what is actually happening. I’ll come back to you about that.

    Regards,
    Stefan

  11. Is there a way to stop the plugin from removing the links? I have tried with different categories and settings but the best I get is the link remains active but the link url seems to only point to the current page.

    Thanks

  12. That’s a strange behaviour in deed. I will have to checkout what causes it. And I actually don’t see you using my plugin on your page. Are you sure it is not some other featured cat widget that you are using, while my plugin is just active and not used?

    Best,
    Stefan

  13. We’re using this plugin on our newspaper site, and recently we’ve noticed that thumbnails get stretched in the left column, especially if they are portrait orientation. Not sure if it is a conflict with another plugin or not. Or possibly the theme. We’re using Zenko magazine theme and WPZoom framework. Have you seen a similar issue before? Just hoping for any ideas to try to fix this problem. Thank you.

  14. Hi Micah,

    and thanks a lot for all the nice things you say about my plugin. As I’m not using it myself, it’s always nice to read that people like it. However, I have not encountered the mistake in my testing environment and will have to check out what the problem actually is.

    Regards,
    Stefan

  15. Greetings,

    This is a fantastic plugin, and has always allowed for a great daily news roundup on my website, http://www.gralienreport.com. However, since the recent WordPress updates to version 3.9, it seems that the plugin now will not allow links appearing in the featured category posts to link to their proper pages from the main page of the site, where the Widget is seen. Instead, clicking the links in this post simply re-direct back to the home page of my site.

    Do you know of any way to repair this within the plugin’s coding? I’m using the Weaver II theme for WordPress, and appreciate the fine work you’ve done with this plugin.

  16. Hello Magda,

    thanks for the apreciation. Unfortunately, it seems that with the last update I made some changes for a couple of people that I cannot reproduce in my testing environment. All works still fine with me, so I released it to the wild.

    First of all, a cache refresh in your browser might do the trick. And if that doesn’t help, here is the old version: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/category-feature.1.6.zip

    Best,
    Stefan

  17. Hi there,

    Love the plugin, nice & easy to use.

    I upgraded to your latest version and now my thumbnails won’t adjust the way they used to. I changed the width again, and refreshed, but no luck. Can I get a copy of previouss version please?

    Cheers ;)

  18. Hello again Cara,

    the next version of the plugin is almost there and you can now align the thumbnail left or right of the text. The textwrap will be according to the browsers ability to deal with CSS3 ‚hyphen‘.

    Regards,
    Stefan

  19. Hi advppc,

    I investigated the whole thing now in some testing environments and unfortunately, I cannot reproduce the error you are encountering. I cannot help you.

    Sorry

  20. Hi Cara,

    at the moment that possibility doesn’t exist. But I could do something about it in the next update.

    Regards,
    Stefan

  21. Hi, I started using your plugin and it worked fine for about an hour or so. However, thereafter it started giving problem of showing my admin as blank page. So I had to deactivate it through cpanel. Could you kindly look into this aspect. Else your plugin is superb, the one I wanted. Thanks and hope to hear from you at the earliest.

  22. Hi,

    at the moment, there is no way. But I can give it a go next month and possibly build in a feature like that.

  23. Ok, it is the excerpt filter hook. Just open the file ‚CF_WidgetClass.php‘ and change line 359 from

    'filter' => true to

    'filter' => false and your problem is solved.

    You will have to change it again after every update though.

    Regards,
    Stefan

  24. Hi Mark,

    At first sight, I think the problem is in the use of the WP-hooks of the sociable plugin. The post excerpt is given with the excerpt filters applied. Most probably, the sociable plugin uses that filter to get it’s stuff behind each post even when only the excerpt is shown.

    The post excerpt cannot be returned without applying the filters because that would break a lot of other plugins. I will have to investigate and come back to you.

    Regards,
    Stefan

  25. Hi

    Any help will be much appreciated. I love the plugin and have installed it on a clients site. She uses the Sociable plugin and your plugin picks up those images as well as the featured post image. You can see exactly what I mean here (I’ve removed the http as I’m not looking for a free backlink!):

    //eatingplansforweightloss.info/jans-weight-loss-blog/how-we-sabotage-our-diets/

    If you scroll to the bottom of the post you’ll see the widget in the footer area (used twice)

    Any help you can give me – ideas how I can stop the Social buttons showing will be really good. Client doesn’t want to disable the other plugin which is understandable

    Thanks

  26. Yes, there is a very easy way to fix it. Just upgrade to version 1.5 of the plugin.

    It should be available quiet soon at wordpress.org

  27. I love this. I would like the category title linked to the posts page for that category. I’m not very good at coding. Is there an easy fix for this?

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