I know there are a number of existing WordPress plugins that create what I’m calling Feature Boxes – an image at the top, with a title, some text, and a Read More button. Yet none contain the comprehensive controls typical of your SO widgets – some will only display existing pages, others don’t give good control over which version of the image is displayed, others don’t let you choose where to put the title (above or below pic, etc.)
Currently, I’m using a combination of your Image Widget on Top of a Headline Widget followed by a Button widget… works well enough, but, it’s prone to client error – they don’t understand how to build a new one or they accidently get rid of one widget, etc.
Your Feature Icon Box widget comes close to this, but I’ve tried using just an image in there instead of an “icon image” but the structure is limited to 150px images, even in box mode.
If anyone knows of a third-party SO widget plugin that has this Feature Box function, I’d love to hear about it.
Hi George
Thanks for reaching out.
In the Features widget you’ll find an image labelled Icon Image Size. That fetches the available image sizes from your Media Library. In addition to small you should also see Medium and Large. You could also create a new image size using a plugin like Simple Image Sizes.
Thanks for pointing that out, Andrew. When I look again in the SO Features widget, I’m seeing the drop down of all available sizes. Not sure what I was looking at last time, unless that was a recent addition.
Note: you have to set the Icon Size to the same width as what’s chosen in the drop-down Icon Image Size, but because the CSS uses that Icon Size to create a square area, anything other than a square image shows oddly because it tiles within the square area. Also, you have to set the Container Size to the same width or the image will hide other elements like the title.
Here’s an example of a 272×182 image – though I’ve set the Icon and Container sizes to 240px because the 272 couldn’t fit into this column with the 20px padding on the widget. You can see how it’s tiling.
http://seehowsupport.com/feature-box-using-so-features-widget.jpg
Sometimes I lose pace of our own changes ( don’t tell anyone :) ), so yes, this could have totally been a new addition.
Code inspection helps us loads, if possible, please create the problem shown in the image on a test/demo page and send me the link. If you want to keep the site private there is a Private Reply checkbox bottom right.
Appreciate your feedback :)
I’ve been messing around with this, Andrew, so I’ve set it back now to what’s described above:
http://wpdemo.shortordersites.com/testing-features-widget/
Thanks, we’ll need to improve the widget in this regard. The challenge is that the widget operates in equal icon dimensions, so in this case 240px x 240px. The challenge is that your image has a width of 181px. Using an image that has equal width and height would be one way to hotfix this problem.
Thanks for that, Andrew. This plugin works very nicely for what it was intended to do – I realize I’m trying to push its boundaries :-)
One thing that might help, rather than necessarily trying to accommodate any height image, is to only display image options that are square. Because I was able to choose an image size from the drop down that was not square, I was expecting to see it with its natural proportions. If only square versions were allowed, there would be no expectation of anything else.
To return to my original point in this thread – a standalone single feature box widget – part of what would be nice to have in the feature set would be the ability to choose a border, the amount of padding within the border, and the choice of having the image inside the padding/border or outside of it and the image flush to the top of the box… just a few requests :-)
In the example above, I limited the SO Features widget to just 1 items per row and added a border on the entire widget with some padding. But of course that’s trying to fudge something that was never really intended.
Thanks for your feedback, I’ve logged the bug here: https://github.com/siteorigin/so-widgets-bundle/issues/217. We have quite a large backlog of feature requests and bug reports for the Widgets Bundle, our developers will assist as soon as they’re able to.
Thanks for your feedback regarding the square options only. That could work but I’m hoping we can come up with a dynamic way of handling this use case.
You’re quite right, having the option for multiple features in one widget does mean that the Features widget needs its own border and padding controls. I’ll be sure to pass those ideas on too.
Thanks Andrew!
BTW, just realized where I ran into the 150px limit on images – it was when I tried to fudge the Testimonials widget to use for my Feature Box structure :-)
Ahh right, that makes sense :) Thanks for letting me know.