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Plugin Description
New Flexibility plus Enhanced User Experience
We all know that sometimes 404 Errors happen on our sites. And sometimes users search but get no results. I believe it’s better to serve users some highly customized and maintained pages/content areas for these cases. What better to do that with Widgets in WordPress? — In my opinion Genesis Framework could improve here so that’s why I just made this little plugin to FINALLY have these two cases maintainable EASILY via your widgets admin. Just place in a search widget, your last blog posts, an image widget, some explanation via text widget, some galleries… You got it. The possibilities are endless. Finally.
Just a great helper tool for Genesis Child Themes!
Please note: The plugin requires the Genesis Framework, a paid premium product released by StudioPress/ WPEngine, Inc. (via studiopress.com)
What the Plugin Does – Advantages & Benefits
- Helps users stay longer on your site because you can give options like search form, recent posts, introductory text, image(s) etc.
- Hugely improved user experience! (Helps decrease the “Oops, I broke the internet…” experiences…)
- Easily customizeable for any webmaster! — In Widgets admin or in Customizer > Widgets
- Works across Genesis child themes – so you can switch your “skin” but not loosing this tool 🙂
- Provides extra Search Form Widget with more options than the default WordPress core widget.
- Handy search form Shortcode!
- Ideal for multilingual websites (for example with “WPML”): Much better handling of 404/Not found content for different languages. — See bottom of FAQ section here for more info on that.
General Features
- Small & lightweight plugin tool: Just activate plugin, place your widgets and you’re done!
- Adds a new widget area (Sidebar) for the “404 Error Page”
- Adds a new widget area (Sidebar) for the “Search not found” page (if there are no results for a search term)
- Adds a new Search Form Widget – which gives you more options than the default WordPress “Search” widget! (Search text, Submit text etc.)
- Adds 2 Shortcodes: a customizeable Search form to place anywhere Shortcodes are supported, plus Shortcode for this plugin’s widget areas.
- Special Bonus for bbPress 2.3+: make the forum search not found content/status widgetized – take full control!
- Adds a few CSS styles for the content area to properly divide widgets with some more space (all other styling is recommended via your child theme)
- Included are two handy helper functions (via child theme) for applying the Genesis ‘Full-Width’ layout option for one or both ‘not found’ cases! — See the FAQ section for more info on that!
- For developers & advanced users: plugin provides lots of filter and acton hooks throughout for easy customization if ever needed.
- All markup is fully compatible with Genesis 2.0+, that means for HTML5 if the child theme supports it (is done all automatically & conditionally under the surface!).
- Integrated default Genesis filters
genesis_search_text and genesis_search_button_text for default strings :-).
- Fully internationalized! Real-life tested and developed with international users in mind!
- Fully WPML compatible!
- Fully Multisite compatible, you can also network-enable it if ever needed (per Site use is recommended).
Translations
- English (default,
en_US) – always included
- German (
de_DE) – always included
- German formal (
de_DE_formal) – always included
- Spanish (
es_ES) – user-submitted – currently 37% complete for v1.5.0
.pot file (genesis-widgetized-notfound.pot) for translators is also always included 🙂- Easy plugin translation platform with GlotPress tool: Translate “Genesis Widgetized Not Found & 404″…
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Idea Behind / Philosophy
I always wanted the 404 and search not found content easily customizeable! The standard messages like “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.” are a shame and lame user experience. Widgets in WordPress are powerful and allow for adding really diverse and custom stuff. So, when building my “Autobahn” child theme for Genesis I really came across this idea and technique. I also implemented it in a lot of my client projects. Now I am really happy to represent this tool in form of a plugin to make more webmasters and especially users/visitors really happy – and help them stay longer on your site!
Credits
- Thanks to Genesis User & Blogger Rick R. Duncan @RickRDuncan for mentioning and supporting this plugin when it came out – Thank you! 🙂
- Any other blog post or something cool about this plugin? – Just contact me 🙂
Screenshots
Two additional Widget areas – here with some example widgets placed in
Live site: displaying 404 Page – widgetized now! (Demo: Genesis Sample 2.6.0)
Live site: displaying here the “Search not found” page (Demo: Genesis Sample 2.6.0)
Widgets in Customizer with Live Preview: setup the 404 Error Page Widget area (Demo: Genesis Sample 2.6.0)
The plugin’s own search widget called “Genesis – Search Form” with way more options than the WordPress core search widget!
The lugin’s optional Shortcodes in action for a page
Live site: Shortcode from test page in action (Demo: Genesis Sample 2.6.0)
Submenu on Genesis Settings – quick access to setup
The plugin’s help tab on the Widgets admin page with additional info
Plugins page entry with Quick Jump Links for setup, preview/ testing
