Finding Lost WordPress Widgets after Core Upgrade

Just a quick note on fixing a problem affecting one of my favorite WordPress Plug-Ins in use at this site, and apparently causing problems with other Plug-Ins elsewhere in the WP universe.

The plug-in affected here is EG-Series, by Emmanuel “EG” Georjon. In short, EG-Series offers a rich suite of options for organizing and displaying multi-post series. Among those options are a a couple of neatly coded “widgets” for displaying tables of “series posts,” but in the last major WordPress Core update from 4.2 to 4.3, the widgets broke, and the downside of exploiting M. Georjon’s excellent work is that M. Georjon does not appear to be working on it anymore: The plug-in hasn’t been updated in two years, and support threads are no longer being resolved.

A little bit of research confirmed that users of other plug-ins have run into this problem, and that a simple fix solved the problem for EG-Series as well – simple as this:

In eg-series-widgets.inc.php, go to line 201 (that last line of code in the file, and change

`add_action(‘init’, ‘EG_Series_Series_Widgets_init’, 1);`

to

`add_action(‘widgets_init’, ‘EG_Series_Series_Widgets_init’, 1);`

Et voilà! The EG-Series widgets are accessible again in Appearance/Widgets and the Customizer.

Now, the or a correct way to perform this alteration is not to hack the EG-Series core file, since it’s possible that someday M. Georjon or someone else may update EG-Series  in some other way, erasing your hack. It may be unlikely that any true upgrade of EG-Series will miss this problem, but there might be other reasons why you would want to preserve the ability to install or re-install a “clean” version of EG-Series.

You can instead add the following code to your theme’s functions.php file:

/**
 *Add Eg_Series_Widgets (corrects problem arising after 4.3+ WP Upgrades)
**/
if ( function_exists( 'EG_Series_Series_Widgets_init' ) ) {

   add_action('widgets_init', 'EG_Series_Series_Widgets_init', 1);

}

I’ve been fiddling with other aspects of the EG-Series plug-in that I think may lead me to create an add-on or fork – a set of corrections and additions, via a new plug-in – presenting another correct way to achieve the same effect. Stay tuned!

 

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