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4 New Widgets for WordPress 4.8

Two months in after the update and it’s time to take a good look at some of the new widgets available in WordPress 4.8 and how they can help us manage and enhance both the performance and content of our websites.

According to an article published by Forbes, WordPress isthe most popular CMS in the world. Indeed, the advantages of WordPress hosting are what make this CMS the number one choice for so many people across the globe. Almost 75 million websites are powered by WordPress, which translates into more than 25% of all websites in the world. Its users create a whopping 69.5 million posts, which are viewed by more than 409 million people, who read 23.6 billion pages and generate 46.8 million comments every month. Now that’s what we call stunning statistics!

As the first major release from WordPress of the year, these long-awaited widgets promise some exciting management enhancements.

The Default Image Widget

WordPress users have been pushing for the development of this widget for a long time and it’s finally here. Up until now, we’ve had to use plugins or write custom HTML to include images in the WordPress sidebar, but the new image widget feature makes all that a thing of the past. Simply drag and drop the image widget to your sidebar and then either upload your images from your computer or select from the already existing images in the media library. Click on the “Add to Widget” button, preview your image choice and save. It’s that simple!

Video Widget

WordPress 4.8 also comes equipped with a default video widget to makevideo uploads to sidebarseven easier. The widget is designed to allow users to grab any video from YouTube, Vimeo and other video oEmbed providers. Just click on “Add Video”, insert the URL into the media uploader popup and then select which thumbnail to display from the options that WordPress provides. Click on the “Add to Widget” button and then save to finish.

Audio Widget

Just as with images and videos, you can now add audio files to your site byadding the audio widget to your sidebar. Click “Add Audio”, upload your file or embed HTML5 audio player files and save. The widget supports MP3, OGG and WAV formats. The great thing about the image, video and audio widgets is that they make managing our online content fun and easy. There’s no longer any need to go looking for similar plugins to help us add media to our sidebars, as WordPress now gives us everything we need.

News and Events Dashboard Widget

The last of the new widgets that’s worth a mention is a dashboard widget that displays all the registered WordPress news and events close to your location and shows up on your dashboard in the admin area. If your website is accessed by a number of different users, each will be shown the news and events that are relevant to their particular location.

Location is determined through IP addresses, timezones and locales to api.wordpress.org. One of the cool features of this widget is that you can also manually change the location in order to see news and events that are linked to any place in the world.

So, if your website is powered by WordPress and you’ve updated to the 4.8 version, why not give these new widgets a try during the second half of 2017?

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