Announcer – Sticky Message Banner & Notification Bar vs Image Widget

Announcer is the ultimate WordPress notification bar plugin designed to help you display important messages, promotions, cookie notices, and alerts anywhere on your site. Whether you want to welcome new visitors, drive traffic to a seasonal sale, or ensure GDPR compliance with a cookie banner, Announcer makes it incredibly easy. Built to be lightweight and user-friendly, you can create eye-catching sticky bars that capture attention without slowing down your site. Add powerful Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons, set up customized display rules, and start boosting your user engagement and conversion rates in minutes. See it in action: View the Live demo of the plugin! ⭐ Why Choose Announcer? (Core Features) Announcer is packed with market-leading features to give you complete control over your website banners: Unlimited Announcements: Create and manage multiple notification bars at the same time. Flexible Positioning: Display messages at the top or bottom of your site. Smart Stacking: Neatly stack multiple banners if more than one announcement is active on a single page. Sticky & Fixed Layouts: Keep your message in view as users scroll, or fix it to the top of the page. Advanced Scheduling: Automate your promo bars by scheduling a start and end date/time. Call-To-Action (CTA) Buttons: Drive clicks with customizable buttons that can open links or dismiss the banner. Horizontal Ticker: Display longer text beautifully with a smooth scrolling news-ticker effect. Smart Cookie Control: Allow users to permanently close notices, or set them to re-display after a specific time. Rich Content Support: Insert any content into your banner, including images, HTML, or shortcodes from other plugins (like forms). Conditional Display Rules: Target specific audiences by showing banners only on certain pages, posts, or categories. 100% Mobile Responsive: Designed mobile-first to ensure your announcements look perfect on any screen size. Customization Made Easy: Choose from multiple layout options and unlimited color palettes to match your brand. Trigger Options: Automatically display banners based on a time delay or user page scroll. Smooth Animations: Engage users with sleek open and close transition effects. Multilingual Ready: Target announcements based on your WPML translated post language. Lightweight & Secure: Clean code that won’t bloat your site, fully GDPR compliant. 🚛 Popular Use Cases & Ideas You can use the Announcer plugin to create a wide variety of sticky messages, including: Promo Bars: Highlight sales, discount coupons, and seasonal offers. Compliance: Display a GDPR-friendly cookie consent banner or privacy policy updates. Lead Generation: Embed newsletter sign-ups (Mailchimp, WPForms) directly into the banner via shortcodes. Alerts & Updates: Share important site-wide notices, business hours. Content Promotion: Drive traffic to new blog posts, product launches, or special events. Welcome Messages: Greet new visitors with custom introductory notes. Social Proof & Feedback: Share quick links, social icons, or ask for customer feedback. 💎 PRO version Ready to take your announcements to the next level? The PRO version offers advanced marketing tools designed to maximize your conversions and give you pinpoint targeting capabilities: Multiple Messages (Ticker/Slider) – Maximize your screen real estate. Add a slider or auto-playing ticker to display multiple messages within a single announcement bar, complete with next/prev navigation. Urgency Countdown Timers – Skyrocket your sales! Embed fully customizable countdown timers right into your promo bars to create FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) for limited-time offers. Advanced Animations – Grab instant attention with eye-catching entrance animations for your banners and funky effects for your CTA buttons. Smart Visitor Targeting – Show the right message to the right user. Conditionally display banners based on traffic source (referrer), device type, OS, browser, user login status, user role, or even visit count! Shortcode Placement – Need a banner inside a specific post? Use shortcodes to place your announcements exactly where you want them, inside pages, posts, or theme templates. One-Click Duplicate – Save time by instantly cloning your favorite announcement setups. Check out the PRO version | View PRO Demo 👋 Feedback & Support We love hearing from our users! If you run into any issues, have questions, or want to share a feature request, please reach out to us in the Official Support Forum.

Image Widget is a simple plugin that uses the native WordPress media manager to add image widgets to your site. Image Widget Features Responsive MU Compatible Handles image resizing and alignment Link the image Add title and description Versatile – all fields are optional Upload, link to external image, or select an image from your media collection Customize the look & feel with filter hooks or theme overrides Quality You Can Trust Image Widget is developed and maintained by The Events Calendar, the same folks behind The Events Calendar, Event Tickets, and a full suite of premium plugins. This plugin is actively supported by our team and contributions from community members. If you see a question in the forum you can help with or have a great idea and want to code it up or submit a patch, that would be awesome! Not only will we shower you with praise and thanks, it’s also a good way to get to know us and lead into options for paid work if you freelance. Pull Requests & Translations Check us out on GitHub to pull request changes. Translations can be submitted here on WordPress.org. Documentation The built in template can be overridden by files within your template. Default vs. Custom Templates The Image Widget comes with a default template for the widget output. If you would like to alter the widget display code, create a new folder called “image-widget” in your template directory and copy over the “views/widget.php” file. Edit the new file to your hearts content. Please do not edit the one in the plugin folder as that will cause conflicts when you update the plugin to the latest release. New in 3.2: You may now also use the “sp_template_image-widget_widget.php” filter to override the default template behavior for .php template files. Eg: if you wanted widget.php to reside in a folder called my-custom-templates/ and wanted it to be called my-custom-name.php: add_filter('sp_template_image-widget_widget.php', 'my_template_filter'); function my_template_filter($template) { return get_template_directory() . '/my-custom-templates/my-custom-name.php'; } Filters There are a number of filters in the code that will allow you to override data as you see fit. The best way to learn what filters are available is always by simply searching the code for ‘apply_filters’. But all the same, here are a few of the more essential filters: widget_title This is actually a pretty typical filter in widgets and is applied to the widget title. widget_text Another very typical widget filter that is applied to the description body text. This filter also takes 2 additional arguments for $args and $instance so that you can learn more about the specific widget instance in the process of filtering the content. image_widget_image_attachment_id Filters the attachment id of the image. Accepts additional $args and $instance arguments. image_widget_image_url Filters the url of the image displayed in the widget. Accepts additional $args and $instance arguments. THIS IS DEPRECATED AND WILL EVENTUALLY BE DELETED image_widget_image_width Filters the display width of the image. Accepts additional $args and $instance arguments. image_widget_image_height Filters the display height of the image. Accepts additional $args and $instance arguments. image_widget_image_maxwidth Filters the inline max-width style of the image. Hint: override this to use this in responsive designs 🙂 Accepts additional $args and $instance arguments. Return null to remove this css from the image output (defaults to ‘100%’). image_widget_image_maxheight Filters the inline max-height style of the image. Accepts additional $args and $instance arguments. Return null to remove this css from the image output (defaults to null) image_widget_image_size Filters the selected image ‘size’ corresponding to WordPress registered sizes. If this is set to ‘tribe_image_widget_custom’ then the width and height are used instead. Accepts additional $args and $instance arguments. image_widget_image_align Filters the display alignment of the image. Accepts additional $args and $instance arguments. image_widget_image_alt Filters the alt text of the image. Accepts additional $args and $instance arguments. image_widget_image_link Filters the url that the image links to. Accepts additional $args and $instance arguments. image_widget_image_link_target Filters the link target of the image link. Accepts additional $args and $instance arguments. image_widget_image_attributes Filters a list of image attributes used in the image output. Similar to ‘wp_get_attachment_image_attributes’ Accepts $instance arguments image_widget_link_attributes Filters a list of attributes used in the image link. Similar to ‘wp_get_attachment_image_attributes’ Accepts $instance arguments Have You Supported the Image Widget? If so, then THANK YOU! Also, feel free to add this line to your wp-config.php file to prevent the image widget from displaying a message after upgrades. define( ‘I_HAVE_SUPPORTED_THE_IMAGE_WIDGET’, true ); For more info on the philosophy here, check out our blog post