OnPoint Plugins

Advanced Sidebar Menu – Version 9.10

Version 9.10 of the Advanced Sidebar Menu plugin is now available and ready for general use.

This version brings a new order option for Page menus, architectural and tooling improvements, and many quality of life fixes and improvements.

Table Of Contents

  1. New Order Option for Page Menus
  2. Continued Architecture Updates: Phase 2
    1. Combine Widget and WidgetWithId Interfaces
    2. Begin Using the Block Interface in PRO
  3. Discontinued Block Registration Size Reduction: Phase 2
  4. Miscellaneous

New Order Option for Page Menus

From the beginning, you have been able to order the pages displayed in menus using various fields like titles or page order. Now you may also choose to order pages by ascending or descending order.

Ordering by descending was previously available using a filter, but now you can select the order in the Pages block or widget. The filter still works, just not needed anymore.

Usage is pretty straight forward, but we added documentation anyway.

Continued Architecture Updates: Phase 2

As we continue the 5-step process of converting the widget logic to use composition, we completed step 2 in the release.

Combine Widget and WidgetWithId Interfaces

  1. All rules from the WidgetWithId interface have been moved to the Widget interface.
  2. The WidgetWithId interface is now officially deprecated.

If you are using the WidgetWithId interface in your code, you must change usage to Widget as the WidgetWithId will be removed in phase 4.

Begin Using the Block Interface in PRO

Going forward, PRO blocks implement the Block interface and will follow the rules provided by the basic version. You may start using the Block interface as a PHP type in your code.

Discontinued Block Registration Size Reduction: Phase 2

We implemented a working solution to reduce the block registration size to a much smaller translated object. The resulting string was roughly 60% smaller than the previous version.

Like all changes, we do thorough testing before including the result in the published plugin. While testing we discovered that compression of page content resulted in the change reducing the page size by 1 KB. This sounds great but the required JavaScript to translate the object back to full data added 2 KB to the page.

Since virtually all modern servers use compression when serving pages, we decided to discontinue this initiative and not publish the changes. We’re leaving phase 1 in place due to the massive savings in resulting size, but will not be continuing with additional changes.

Miscellaneous

  • Enable TypeScript strict mode in PRO and fix all suggestions.
  • Fixed “Display on single posts” option in the categories menu.
  • Required PRO version 9.9.0+ in the basic version.
  • Required basic version 9.7.0+ in the PRO version.
  • Upgraded NodeJS to version 22.21.1.
  • Introduced advanced-sidebar-menu/pages/general-after slot fill.
  • Tested to WordPress core 6.8.3.