Zen Blogger

Changelog

1.8.5

• Corrected the Contributors username and the author profile link, which were both missing a letter.
• Rewrote the description to describe this plugin on its own terms, without comparisons to other post widgets, and added a step-by-step guide to configuring a widget.

1.8.4

• Fixed: a widget nested inside a container that does not keep its children in a plain list could not be found by the background request, so pagination and filtering failed on exactly those layouts. Elementor’s own recursive search is now used, which descends through the filter such containers use to expose their children.

1.8.3

• Fixed: “Avoid duplicates” stopped working past the first page. It reads a list of what the page has already shown, and that list lives for one request — a Load More or infinite-scroll fetch is a new request, where it starts empty. So page two was drawn from a different result set than page one, and posts could repeat or be skipped between them. The set is now carried across.

1.8.2

• Fixed: loading the dynamic tags warned on every page if glob() failed — an unreadable directory or an open_basedir restriction — because the result was iterated without checking it was a list.
• Fixed: the REST filter sanitiser could return null rather than a string if the regex engine gave up, so a value that was neither cleaned nor a string could travel on. A failure now drops the filter.
• Removed dead code: an unset() of an array key that was never set, and an is_array() guard on a value that is always an array.

1.8.1

• Changed: the excerpt is a paragraph rather than a div. Text-processing plugins — hyphenation, typography filters, translation — look for <p>, and a div quietly opted the excerpt out of every one of them. The theme’s paragraph margin is reset with it, so card spacing stays owned by the card.

1.8.0

• Changed: with infinite scroll the feed loads itself, so it no longer shows a button telling you to do what it is already doing. A small spinner appears while a page is fetched, and the button returns — visible — once auto-loading reaches its limit and there is genuinely something to press. It stays reachable by Tab throughout, and remains a real link for visitors without JavaScript.
• Fixed: the loading spinner was styled but never rendered, so no pagination mode has ever shown one.
• Removed: the outline the paginator drew around Load More and the page numbers. The Border, Background and Radius controls are still there for anyone who wants one.

1.7.4

• Changed: Clear and Apply now take the Selected Text Color and Selected Background — the same pair that marks a chosen term — so an action reads as a button using a colour the bar already defines. The borders 1.7.3 put on every pill are gone with them.

1.7.3

• Fixed: the filter pills, Clear and Apply had no border or background of their own, so the whole bar read as a row of stray words rather than controls. They now carry the same neutral outline the paginator got, which any Border, Background or Radius control still overrides.

1.7.2

• Fixed: the Clear button took the theme’s button colour on hover and kept it on focus after being clicked, while the filter controls beside it did not. Themes style bare button:hover and button:focus at a specificity a single class cannot beat — Astra does exactly this. Those states are now held to the filter bar’s own design, and every filter style control reaches them too, so a colour or background set for the bar carries into hover and focus instead of being dropped.

1.7.1

• Fixed: the filter bar’s two spacing sliders shipped with no default, so the panel showed them at zero and saved zero the moment either was touched — leaving the search box and the controls beneath it in contact. Both now carry a real default. An existing widget already saved at zero keeps it; set Space Between Rows to restore the gap.

1.7.0

• Fixed: the filter bar did nothing at all whenever AJAX was off — with pagination set to None, with the Update Without Reloading switch off, or on the Current Query source. Its Apply button only exists for visitors without JavaScript, so with scripting on there was no way to submit it. Changing a control now reloads the page with the chosen filters, the same round trip the no-JavaScript path makes.
• New: Current Query works with Load More and infinite scroll on archives. The widget now tells the endpoint which listing it is on — this term, this author, this search — and the endpoint checks that identity against real objects before rebuilding it, so a caller still cannot define a query of its own.
• Changed: a taxonomy left offering a single term is dropped from the filter bar. On a category archive every post already has that category, so the control was a button that could not change anything; search and sort remain.

1.6.0

• Fixed: the filter bar listed every term on the site with its site-wide count, whatever the widget was actually showing. On an author or category archive that meant offering terms with nothing in the archive at all, and counts that did not match the results underneath. It now lists only the terms present in the widget’s own posts, counted against them.
• New: zenblog_filter_scope_limit filter, for how many posts the bar may inspect when working out which terms are present (default 1000).

1.5.2

• Fixed: with the Current Query source, the widget stayed on page one while the rest of the archive moved. It read its own page number instead of the archive’s, so /page/2/ showed page one’s posts. It now follows the page the visitor is on, and its paging links drive the archive rather than a private query argument.
• Fixed: the result count read “0 posts” whenever pagination was switched off, because the query was told not to count rows.

1.5.1

• New: drop shadow controls for the filter bar — one for the bar itself, one for the controls inside it.
• New: drop shadow control for the paginator, which had every other style control but this one.

1.5.0

• Fixed: pagination did nothing at all when the widget was placed in a Theme Builder template. The widget reported the post being viewed, but its settings live in the template, so every background request looked for the widget in the wrong post and was refused. It now reports the document it was placed in, and passes the displayed post separately.
• Fixed: “Related to the current post” and “Exclude current post” were ignored from page two onwards. A background request has no current post, so the second page was built from a different query than the first.
• Fixed: the Load More button stayed on screen after the last page. Pressing it asked for a page that does not exist and appended the “no posts found” notice below the results — the stray line of unstyled text under the grid.
• Fixed: a card template’s dynamic background image never appeared on the front end, though it showed in the editor. Elementor supplies that kind of value once per page under one shared selector, which cannot describe nine different posts; each card now carries its own scoped rule.
• Fixed: carousel autoplay could come up dead on an optimised site. Swiper refuses to schedule anything while the carousel measures zero, and never tries again — so a stylesheet arriving late left autoplay permanently off. It now starts as soon as the carousel has a width.
• Fixed: Load More and the page numbers rendered as bare text, with no border or background of their own.
• New: alignment and padding controls for the paginator, plus a full-width option for the Load More button.
• New: the Load More button’s text can be edited when Infinite Scroll is selected, not only Load More.
• New: alignment control for the excerpt, including justified.
• New: typography, colour, alignment and spacing controls for the result count.
• Changed: Clear Filters now takes the same style controls as the rest of the filter bar.
• Changed: with the “Current page query” source, pagination stays as real page links. That query only exists on the page itself and cannot be rebuilt for a background request.

1.4.1

• Fixed: infinite scroll stopped after the first automatic load. It watched the paginator, which is replaced on every page, so the observer was left watching a node that was no longer in the document. It now watches a dedicated element that is never re-rendered.
• Fixed: paging links inside an AJAX response pointed at the REST endpoint instead of the page, because they were built from the current request. Opening one in a new tab produced raw JSON.
• Fixed: infinite scroll could stall on a tall screen, where the trigger stayed on-screen after a page was appended and so never crossed the threshold again.
• New: the infinite-scroll auto-load limit is a control rather than a fixed value.

1.4.0

• Fixed: with many pages, the numbered paginator was a trap — the window stayed on its first range, so pages beyond it could never be reached. It now shows first and last with an ellipsis, and the server re-renders the window on every AJAX page change.
• Fixed: the search box shared the top row with the filters on the front end even though it looked right in the editor. It now owns its own full-width row at any container width.
• Fixed: the meta divider stopped where the text stopped, because Content Alignment shrink-wraps every child of the card body. It now spans the card.
• Fixed: Read More sits at the foot of the card, directly above the meta divider, instead of wherever the excerpt happened to end.
• Removed: the Apply button, for anyone with JavaScript. It now exists only inside , so it is genuinely absent rather than hidden.
• New: the search, filters and sort share one container with its own background, border, radius, padding and row spacing.
• New: custom text for the result count, reading time and comment count, each with a %s placeholder.
• New: meta alignment — left, centre, right or spread.
• Changed: Clear filters is a button, matching the filter controls rather than reading as a stray link.
• Changed: the carousel’s play/pause button is out of sight by default and appears when a keyboard user reaches it. It still cannot be removed while autoplay is on.

1.3.0

• New: sort options are now a repeater. Choose which orders to offer, rename each one, and drag to reorder — the first row is the default.
• Changed: the Apply button is hidden once the script takes over, because results already update as a filter changes. It is still rendered for visitors without JavaScript, and a new “Apply Automatically” switch turns auto-updating off if you prefer an explicit Apply.
• Fixed: the sort repeater’s row label used a triple brace, which injects user-typed text raw into the editor panel.

1.2.2

• New: excerpts are built from paragraphs only, so headings, list items, captions and table cells no longer end up in the card text. Choose “all content” if you preferred the old behaviour.
• New: meta can sit under the title or at the foot of the card, with an optional divider you can colour, thicken and space.
• Changed: headings no longer gain an underline on hover. The Title hover colour control is there if you want an affordance.
• Fixed: the focus ring used currentColor, so on a focused pill or button — where the text is white — it was invisible against a light card. It now draws a two-tone ring that contrasts on any background, and uses the system Highlight colour in forced-colors mode.
• Fixed: changing Columns in the editor did not re-render the widget, leaving the Feature layout’s column span stale until another control forced a redraw.

1.2.1

• Fixed: the Posts widget never applied the skin class, so Overlay, Overlap, Side, Editorial and Minimal all rendered as Classic.
• Fixed: combining two taxonomy filters silently applied only the first. The AJAX endpoint sanitised the filter query with a function that turns “&” into “&”.
• Fixed: a non-Latin search term was destroyed in transit for the same reason, by a sanitiser that strips percent-encoding.
• Fixed: theme link styling underlined card titles, term pills and the Read More button. Card link rules now out-specify the theme without !important.
• Added a Respect “Reduce Motion” control to the Posts widget, matching the carousel.

1.2.0

• New: card templates. Pick any saved Elementor template and it is rendered once per post, with that post in context — a loop item without Elementor Pro.
• New: nine dynamic tags (title, excerpt, date, terms, author, reading time, comment count, URL, featured image) so template cards can actually read the post. Free Elementor ships none of its own.
• Rebuilt the Posts filter as a real search-and-filter form: keyword search, several taxonomies at once, buttons / checkboxes / dropdowns, a sort control, live result count and a Clear button. It is a GET form, so it works with JavaScript off and every view has a shareable URL.
• Fixed: the masonry Row Gap control had no effect, because row-gap does nothing on a CSS-columns layout.
• Fixed: a feature card could span every column, leaving nothing beside it. The span is now capped against the column count, per breakpoint.
• Fixed: cards did not stretch to fill their grid cell, so rows of mixed-length posts did not line up.
• Fixed: the address bar could accumulate duplicate filter parameters.
• Fixed: the Clear button never appeared after an AJAX update.

1.1.0

• New Posts widget: grid, masonry, list and feature layouts with page numbers, previous/next, Load More or infinite scroll.
• AJAX pagination and an optional taxonomy filter bar, both built on real links so they work without JavaScript.
• Result counts are announced, the grid reports its busy state, and focus moves to the first new post after a visitor-initiated load.
• Card, query and style code now lives in one shared implementation used by both widgets.
• The Posts script is a separate file, so a page with only a carousel never downloads it.

1.0.1

• Fixed a fatal error in the Elementor editor. get_style_depends() read widget settings, but Elementor also calls it on widget types, which have none — producing “sanitize_settings(): Argument #1 must be of type array, null given” and a white screen. The icon stylesheet is now enqueued at render time instead.

1.0.0

• Initial release: the Blog Carousel widget with six skins, a full query builder, Swiper-based motion, and WCAG 2.2 AA controls.
• schema.org ItemList output in JSON-LD, with a Zen GEO integration that shares node identity instead of duplicating it.