Genesis Widgetized Not Found & 404 – Easy Setup for 404 Page and Search Not Found

New Flexibility plus Enhanced User Experience

We all know that sometimes 404 Errors happen on our sites. And sometimes users search but get no results. I believe it’s better to serve users some highly customized and maintained pages/content areas for these cases. What better to do that with Widgets in WordPress? — In my opinion Genesis Framework could improve here so that’s why I just made this little plugin to FINALLY have these two cases maintainable EASILY via your widgets admin. Just place in a search widget, your last blog posts, an image widget, some explanation via text widget, some galleries… You got it. The possibilities are endless. Finally.

Just a great helper tool for Genesis Child Themes!

Please note: The plugin requires the Genesis Framework, a paid premium product released by StudioPress/ WPEngine, Inc. (via studiopress.com)

What the Plugin Does – Advantages & Benefits

• Helps users stay longer on your site because you can give options like search form, recent posts, introductory text, image(s) etc.
• Hugely improved user experience! (Helps decrease the “Oops, I broke the internet…” experiences…)
• Easily customizeable for any webmaster! — In Widgets admin or in Customizer > Widgets
• Works across Genesis child themes – so you can switch your “skin” but not loosing this tool 🙂
• Provides extra Search Form Widget with more options than the default WordPress core widget.
• Handy search form Shortcode!
• Ideal for multilingual websites (for example with “WPML”): Much better handling of 404/Not found content for different languages. — See bottom of FAQ section here for more info on that.

General Features

• Small & lightweight plugin tool: Just activate plugin, place your widgets and you’re done!
• Adds a new widget area (Sidebar) for the “404 Error Page”
• Adds a new widget area (Sidebar) for the “Search not found” page (if there are no results for a search term)
• Adds a new Search Form Widget – which gives you more options than the default WordPress “Search” widget! (Search text, Submit text etc.)
• Adds 2 Shortcodes: a customizeable Search form to place anywhere Shortcodes are supported, plus Shortcode for this plugin’s widget areas.
• Special Bonus for bbPress 2.3+: make the forum search not found content/status widgetized – take full control!
• Adds a few CSS styles for the content area to properly divide widgets with some more space (all other styling is recommended via your child theme)
• Included are two handy helper functions (via child theme) for applying the Genesis ‘Full-Width’ layout option for one or both ‘not found’ cases! — See the FAQ section for more info on that!
• For developers & advanced users: plugin provides lots of filter and acton hooks throughout for easy customization if ever needed.
• All markup is fully compatible with Genesis 2.0+, that means for HTML5 if the child theme supports it (is done all automatically & conditionally under the surface!).
• Integrated default Genesis filters genesis_search_text and genesis_search_button_text for default strings :-).
• Fully internationalized! Real-life tested and developed with international users in mind!
• Fully WPML compatible!
• Fully Multisite compatible, you can also network-enable it if ever needed (per Site use is recommended).

Translations

• English (default, en_US) – always included
• German (de_DE) – always included
• German formal (de_DE_formal) – always included
• Spanish (es_ES) – user-submitted – currently 37% complete for v1.5.0
• .pot file (genesis-widgetized-notfound.pot) for translators is also always included 🙂
• Easy plugin translation platform with GlotPress tool: Translate “Genesis Widgetized Not Found & 404″…

Liked Genesis Widgetized Not Found & 404?

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Check out my other Genesis Plugins

• Genesis Extra Settings Transporter – addionally export Genesis specific plugin & child theme settings
• Genesis What’s New Info – Show the what’s new overview page via left-hand admin menu
• Genesis Layout Extras – Setup Default Layouts in Genesis for WordPress
• Genesis Shortcode UI (for Shortcake)
• Genesis Elementor Canvas
• Genesis Featured Page Extras – more options for the featured page widget
• Genesis Prose Extras – add-on for Prose child theme
• Genesis Printstyle Plus – just print it out – only what’s needed
• Genesis Widgetized Archive – easily set up content for your Archive page (template)
• Genesis Widgetized Footer – easily set up your copyright/ credits/ back to top
• Genesis Connect for Easy Digital Downloads – plugin for easy & elegant integration
• My Genesis plugins newsletter

My Other WordPress Plugins

• Toolbar Extras for Genesis & Elementor – WordPress Admin Bar Enhanced
• Toolbar Extras for Oxygen Builder – Add-On plugin
• Builder Template Categories – for WordPress Page Builders
• Polylang Connect for Elementor – Language Switcher & Template Tweaks
• Simple Download Manager for WP Document Revisions
• Multisite Toolbar Additions
• Cleaner Plugin Installer
• My plugins newsletter

Donate

Enjoy using Genesis Widgetized Not Found & 404? Please consider making a donation to support the project’s continued development.

Plugin Links

• Translations (WP GlotPress Platform)
• User support forums
• Code snippets archive for customizing, GitHub Gist
• DECKERWEB WordPress Plugins Facebook Group

Idea Behind / Philosophy

I always wanted the 404 and search not found content easily customizeable! The standard messages like “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.” are a shame and lame user experience. Widgets in WordPress are powerful and allow for adding really diverse and custom stuff. So, when building my “Autobahn” child theme for Genesis I really came across this idea and technique. I also implemented it in a lot of my client projects. Now I am really happy to represent this tool in form of a plugin to make more webmasters and especially users/visitors really happy – and help them stay longer on your site!

Credits

• Thanks to Genesis User & Blogger Rick R. Duncan @RickRDuncan for mentioning and supporting this plugin when it came out – Thank you! 🙂
• Any other blog post or something cool about this plugin? – Just contact me 🙂