With WordPress 4.8 “Evans“, we welcome 3 new Widgets into the core WordPress offering, along with an update to the basic Text Widget.

Here’s a quick demo of how the Widgets look, using the Widgets on Pages plugin to display them in this post.

We can see here a Text Widget, that has been populated with it’s new visual editor. In the example above I’ve used it to add formatted text, along with a hyperlink.

I’ve also used the new Audio Widget to embed a nice audio player. In the example above I’ve populated it with a .wav file that I’d uploaded, but it could also support files linked by URL.

The new Video Widget also gives me a nice inline player, and again can be populated from the media library but also from URLs like in the case above where I have referenced a YouTube link.

The last widget I’ve used above is the new Image Widget.

Power to the Casual Users

All-in, these 3 new widgets, and the updated editing experience of the Text Widget, have given a lot of power to casual WordPress users. For a long time authors and site owners have had to “hack” the plain text widget, and use extra plugins to achieve things as simple as adding rich text to their sidebars.