Announcement Banners + Other Updates

July 2021
Look over here!

WideRange Galleries version 5.6 brings a useful new feature for our websites: announcement banners! When you activate the announcement banner, a message of your choice will display in a prominent banner bar at the top of your website. This is a great way to announce sales, discounts, promotions, or other important news.

You can find the announcement banner controls in the WideRange admin on the new Notices Settings page in the Settings section. Here you can:

  • Write your announcement message of choice, including links if desired.
  • Enable or disable the banner.
  • Schedule a date range to display the banner.
  • Choose whether you want to include a "close" button for your viewers to close the banner if they wish.
  • Customize the banner background color, text color, and link color.

Prior to this new feature, some clients have been using the "HelloBar" third party plugin for this type of banner feature. However, HelloBar has some major drawbacks including fairly large download scripts that degrade site performance reports, and unknown behind-the-scenes tracking which could potentially violate GDPR privacy laws.

The new native, built-in banner bar feature solves these problems, with no extra scripts to download and no mysterious or invasive tracking or data harvesting.

Other Recent Updates

Here are a few other new features that I haven't blogged about yet, and a recap of others I have:

Version 5.6

  • New Notices Settings page in the admin, which includes the announcement banner as well as the Vacation Message (moved here from the Cart Settings page).
  • The Vacation Message can now be scheduled as well.

Version 5.5

  • Admin interface improvements, including "sticky" Save buttons that stick in place at the bottom of the pages (when appropriate), so the Save buttons are always conveniently accessible and consistently placed.
  • Save button options: Many admin pages now have several Save button options allowing you choose whether to save and refresh the page, save and return to the last menu, etc.

Version 5.4

Version 5.3

  • Photo-assigned Products: When you are adding or modifying a photo in the admin, you can now add a new product that is assigned to that photo, or assign an existing product to that photo. The product will then show up for sale on the photo's page in the same "box" format as the print options, and the product will be associated with that photo. This is a great feature for non-print products that are still specific to certain photos - examples that come to mind could be puzzles or note cards. This is also very useful for non-photographers who are selling one-off, non-print products like original artwork, sculptures, jewelry, etc. In that case, you can quickly create a product with pricing and description directly for each photo in a gallery.

Version 5.2

Posted in Features, Version Updates and tagged Sales.