You gotta have Widgets.

I lost all my widgets when my website crashed after updating to WordPress 4.7.2  I discovered the problem was caused by non-compatible plug ins. My screen showed the white page of death.

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare add_term_meta() (previously declared in /home3/cecilia/public_html/wp-includes/taxonomy.php:1153) in /home3/cecilia/public_html/wp-content/plugins/taxonomy-metadata/taxonomy-metadata.php on line 97

With the help of the marvellous James F at Hostgator we managed to get me up and running again. (see previous post.)

BUT. I’d lost all my widgets. Most of my plug ins were incompatible with my new updated system. What’s a girl to do?

Jetpack has the answers. Mostly.

This is a great package. Widgets coming out of its ears. Top Ten posts to show in your sidebar. Background stats to show how many views for each post. Subscriber email check box. Connection to your latest Tweets. Loadsa widgets.

You can tell there’s a ‘BUT’ coming.

I don’t like the image widget from Jetpack

It distorts your pictures. I’ve tried every which way to improve their appearance but gave up in the end. Images within the text of a post look fine.

The widget screen above from my media library looks okay. But when I tried to put an image box in my contents sidebar on the right of the page the picture was as distorted as the ones in the popular posts widget in the primary sidebar on the left.

Altering pixel size did nothing to help. Instead I looked elsewhere.

Black Studio TinyMCE widget

This is the one I always used before updating. I checked its compatibility and – Bob’s your uncle – it’s good to go.

The burning hand image I use for my CRPS posts looks as it should in the contents sidebar. I’m happy to continue using this widget.

Now I want to know how to put borders around images as I could before updating. It used to be an easy option. Maybe I’m just missing the information. It must be here somewhere.