Action Bar for HivePress WP Registry grade A. No security issues foundWP RegistryNo security issues foundOpen the reportA

Adds a customisable, app-style bottom navigation bar to HivePress websites, on any screen size you choose.

Description

Action Bar for HivePress gives your marketplace a more app-like feel by adding a fixed bottom navigation bar.

Features:

• Up to five items per bar, each with a Font Awesome icon, an optional label, and a link. Drag to reorder them.
• Link choices for the homepage, listings, listing submission, vendors, account or login, messages, favourites, the signed-in user's own public profile, a sign-in pop-up for logged-out visitors, the Notifications for HivePress bell, any HivePress account or extension page, any published WordPress page, the WooCommerce cart and account area (when WooCommerce is installed), or any custom URL.
• Optional prominent style per item, lifting it into a raised circle, ideal for one main action such as Add listing.
• A separate Vendor Bar shown to users with a published vendor profile instead of the standard User Bar.
• A separate Logged-Out Bar, switched on with its own toggle, so visitors who are not signed in can be shown a different set of items.
• Full colour controls with a neutral light-grey palette out of the box, including bar, icon, label, active, prominent, and badge colours, plus an optional rounded backdrop behind every icon, each with a colour wheel and a typable hex box.
• A notification badge you can switch on per item, with a choice of counter for each: Account activity (HivePress), the combined count that messages, bookings, and orders feed; Unread messages; or Unread notifications from Notifications for HivePress.
• Adjustable bar height between 44 and 120 pixels, adjustable icon size, an icon weight that thickens the glyphs, and a separate corner radius for each corner of the bar.
• Individual on and off toggles for mobile, tablet and desktop screens, so you can run the bar on phones only, or right across desktop as well. On large screens the buttons gather into a centred dock rather than stretching across the window.
• Visibility controls to hide the bar on selected pages and on the WooCommerce cart and checkout.
• Labels can be positioned above or below the icons.
• An optional frosted glass effect, with adjustable opacity, blur strength and a soft top edge, that blurs the page scrolling behind the bar.
• An option to leave room for the home bar on iPhones without a home button, so it never overlaps your buttons.
• Your settings are kept if you delete the plugin, unless you tick the box that asks for them to be removed.

All settings are found under HivePress, Settings, Action Bar.

For developers: the bar can be altered with the filters hivepress/v1/action_bar/items, hivepress/v1/action_bar/visible and hivepress/v1/action_bar/breakpoints.

Installation

1. Upload the plugin files to the /wp-content/plugins/action-bar-for-hivepress directory, or install the plugin zip through the WordPress admin.
2. Activate the plugin through the Plugins screen. HivePress must be installed and active.
3. Configure the bar under HivePress, Settings, Action Bar.

Once installed, the plugin checks for new versions automatically and updates through the normal WordPress Plugins screen, just like a plugin from the WordPress.org directory.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which icons can I use?

Each item has an icon dropdown with live previews that you can search by name. It lists the thousand or so Font Awesome 5 solid icons HivePress uses for its own attribute icons, the names added in Font Awesome 6 and 7, and a set of brand icons such as Stripe, PayPal and WhatsApp, which are marked "(brand)" so you can tell them apart. The plugin ships the solid, regular and brand fonts, so those three styles render; the light, thin and duotone styles belong to Font Awesome Pro and are not included. To set a full class name yourself, such as far fa-heart, use the hivepress/v1/action_bar/items filter. Note that a theme or plugin which replaces or subsets Font Awesome can remove glyphs, so check your chosen icons still appear after such a change.

How does the notification badge work?

Each item's Badge dropdown chooses which unread counter appears on that item, and there are three to choose from. Account activity (HivePress) is the combined count from HivePress's own header, which extensions such as Messages, Bookings, and Marketplace add to (unread messages, unpaid bookings, booking requests, and pending orders); it does not include notifications from Notifications for HivePress. Unread messages is the narrower messages-only count, matching the badge on the account menu's Messages item; it is offered whenever the Messages extension is active, and reads zero unless "Store messages in the database" is ticked under HivePress, Settings, Messages. Unread notifications is the unread count from Notifications for HivePress, which is what puts a working notification bell on the bar; it is offered only while that plugin is active, and an item set to it shows nothing rather than quietly counting something else if that plugin is later removed. Since the combined count already includes unread messages, a Messages item usually reads best with Unread messages, a Notifications item with Unread notifications, and an Account item with Account activity (HivePress). The count is rendered fresh on every page view for signed-in users, so it clears as soon as the messages are read or the bookings are handled. If your caching plugin serves cached pages to signed-in users, exclude signed-in visitors from the cache so the count stays personal and current.

How do I get the frosted glass look?

Tick Glass effect in the Display section. The bar then becomes semi-transparent and blurs the page scrolling behind it. Three controls appear with it: Glass opacity decides how solid your bar colour stays, Glass blur decides how soft the page behind becomes, and Glass top edge draws the faint highlight that makes it read as glass. Pick a light bar colour on a light site and a dark one on a dark site, then check your icons and labels against your busiest page, because a very transparent bar can make them hard to read. Browsers that cannot blur, and visitors who have asked their device to reduce transparency, are shown the ordinary solid bar instead.

Does deleting the plugin remove my settings?

Not unless you ask it to. Deleting keeps your items and settings so you can reinstall and carry on. WordPress prints its own warning on the delete screen saying data will go, but it prints that for every plugin that has an uninstall routine at all, and it does not apply here. If you do want a clean sweep, tick Delete all data in the Removing the Plugin section first. Switching the plugin off never removes anything.

The bar overlaps the bar at the bottom of my iPhone screen. What do I do?

Tick "Room for the home bar" in the Display section. On iPhones without a home button there is a thin bar at the very bottom of the screen, and that option asks the browser to report how much room it needs so the action bar sits above it. It is safe to leave ticked whatever your theme does, and it has no effect on other phones.

Where does the Account item link to?

For signed-in users it links directly to the account settings page, and for signed-out visitors it links to the login page. The generic account URL in HivePress only forwards to the first account menu item, which changes with the user state and installed extensions, so a fixed destination is more predictable. Use the hivepress/v1/action_bar/items filter if you prefer a different target.

Which breakpoints are used?

The bar switches on how wide the browser window is, not on what device someone is using. By default that is 47.99em and below for small screens, 48em to 64em for medium ones, and 64.01em and above for large ones, which works out as roughly up to 767px, 768px to 1024px, and 1025px and wider on a site using the standard 16px base font size. They are set in em so they follow your theme's base font size and stay in step with HivePress's own grid. All three can be changed with the hivepress/v1/action_bar/breakpoints filter, using the keys mobile_max, tablet_min, tablet_max and desktop_min.

Can I show the bar on desktop too?

Yes. Tick "Desktop" in the Display section and the bar appears on laptops and desktop computers as well. Most sites leave this off, because visitors on a big screen already have your main menu and the bar takes up room at the bottom of every page, but it is worth turning on if you want the site to feel like an app everywhere. On large screens the buttons gather into a centred dock instead of stretching the full width, which is what they do on phones.

How are updates delivered?

The plugin includes an update checker that watches the official GitHub repository for new releases. When a newer version is published, WordPress shows the update on the Plugins and Dashboard, Updates screens, and you can install it with the usual one-click update. You can force an immediate check with the Check for updates link on the Plugins screen. No account, licence key, or extra configuration is required.

Changelog

1.7.2

• Fixed: updating two of these extensions one after the other could fail on the second with "up to date" until Check for updates was pressed again. WordPress rebuilds its update list after each update by asking wordpress.org first, and gives up on the whole list when that call is slow; the plugin now keeps its own update in the list regardless.
• Changed: a release found more than an hour ago is refreshed in the background whenever the Plugins screen is opened, so the newest release is offered rather than an intermediate one.
• New: a Check for updates bulk action on the Plugins screen, which checks every selected extension in one go.

1.7.1

• New: the page bars work with the HivePress Social Links extension. Every social link switched on for listings or vendors is offered as a page bar item, opens exactly what the extension's own button opens (a WhatsApp number as a wa.me chat, Telegram as t.me, Viber in the Viber app), takes the brand icon by default, and social profiles open in a new tab.

1.7.0

• New: page bars. Under Display, tick Listing page bar or Vendor page bar and everyone viewing a single listing or a vendor profile sees that bar instead of their usual one. Their dropdowns add the listing's or vendor's email, phone and website attributes, each opening as an email, a call or a link and left out where the attribute is empty, and a Message pop-up that opens the Messages extension's send-message window for the listing or vendor on screen (the sign-in window for logged-out visitors; left out for the owner). An empty page bar leaves visitors with their usual bar.

1.6.6

• Fixed: the settings tab showed a critical error after saving an item whose icon is one the icon library knows but HivePress core's own list does not, such as "circle-plus". The stored icon was being written back into the picker as a full list while the picker also loads over AJAX, which HivePress cannot do at once. The row now keeps its icon and the tab loads.

1.6.5

• Changed: the counter badge on an item is now the same 24px circle with bold 12px text as the counters in the site header and account menu, so every badge on a phone reads as one family. A new Badge size setting under Display takes it back to 16px if you prefer the smaller overlay.
• Changed: the badge background now defaults to the red HivePress uses for its own counters (#ff5a5f) rather than a different red, so the badge matches the counters in the header and account menu. A site still holding the old default is moved to the new one once; any other colour you have chosen is kept.

1.6.4

• Changed: the Install and Activate offer for Notifications for HivePress is now a link within the sentence rather than a button.

1.6.3

• Fixed: typing an item's label drew a broken glyph beside the card's icon. The shared icon library is updated to the version that fixes it.
• New: the Display section names Notifications for HivePress, which gives the bar its bell and unread badge, linked to its announcement and with an Install or Activate button when it is missing, for owners allowed to do that.

1.6.2

• Fixed: dragging the preview wider only widened the box around the bar. The bars now follow the width of the preview, with the tablet and desktop rules applying as it grows, just as they would in a browser window.

1.6.1

• Fixed: the Link and Icon boxes on each item card were only a fifth of the card's width, a leftover from the old row layout. Every field on a card now spans it.
• Changed: the tablet and desktop preview now has a Mobile button beside the other two, which closes it and returns you to the phone preview in the side panel.

1.6.0

• Added: a live preview to the right of the settings, drawing the logged-out, user and vendor bars with the settings on the page and following every change as you make it. It uses the bar's own stylesheet, so what you see is the bar itself; the badge number and the highlighted first item are examples rather than live figures.
• Changed: each bar's items are now shown as cards, matching Account Menu Enhancer - a header with the item's icon and label, folding the fields beneath it. Click a header to open or close a card; they remember which you left open. Drag the handle on a header to reorder items, as before.

1.5.13

• Fixed: an item with no icon of its own could take the icon of the item above it when the settings were saved. This came in with the icon library in 1.5.12; if any of your bar items gained an icon you did not choose, open the Action Bar tab, correct those rows, and save once.

1.5.12

• Changed: icons are now drawn directly into the page instead of being loaded as a font. A visitor's browser no longer downloads roughly 230 KB of stylesheet and font files just to show a few small pictures, and the icons can no longer clash with the icon font HivePress loads itself. Your colour and size settings work exactly as before.
• Added: every icon in the free Font Awesome 7 set is now available, brand icons included, which is around 800 more than before. Type a few letters to find one rather than scrolling a long list, and each result still shows you the icon itself.
• Changed: the settings screen loads a great deal faster, because the icon choices are fetched as you search instead of every one of them being written into the page.

1.5.6

• Housekeeping only: nothing on your settings screen has moved, changed or behaves differently. The settings-screen code this extension shares with the others in the family was reformatted to match them line for line, so that a fix made to one of them can be checked against all of them in one go.

1.5.5

• The settings tab now carries the same controls as the other extensions in this family: the quick links stay in view as you scroll and say "Jump to a section:", a Save Changes tab sits on the right edge of the screen wherever you are on the page (a bar across the bottom on a phone), and a back-to-top button appears once you have scrolled down. Whichever of these extensions you have installed, you see one set of controls, in the same places.
• Fixed: if another extension in this family also added quick links to a settings tab, you could have ended up with two rows of them stacked on top of each other. The extensions can now see each other's controls and only one set is drawn, whichever extension gets there first.
• Fixed: the section headings keep the ids WordPress already gives them, so a link or a bookmark pointing at a section carries on working.
• The quick links are also drawn correctly now when you reach the settings from the HivePress menu without picking a tab first.

1.5.4

• Changed: a code comment that described a different function had been left stranded above one that documents itself, so a developer reading the file saw the wrong description. Comments only. Nothing about how the plugin works has changed.

1.5.3

• Changed: outline icon styles now render as outlines. An icon set to an outline style previously appeared filled in, because only the solid style was included with the plugin and your browser quietly used that instead.

1.5.2

• Changed: the icon library is now included with the plugin instead of being loaded from a third-party server, which is faster and keeps every request on your own site. Your icons and settings are unaffected.

1.5.1

• Fixed: the notifications panel opened from the bar's bell now floats directly above the bell, centred on it, instead of appearing at the far right of the screen. Near a screen edge it shifts just enough to stay fully on screen.
• Fixed: the bar's bell and the header bell now work side by side. The bar renders its own complete bell, and Notifications for HivePress runs every bell on the page, so enabling the header bell no longer leaves one of the two dead. Needs Notifications for HivePress with multi-bell support; on an older copy of that plugin the header bell keeps working and the bar's bell acts as a plain link to the notifications page.
• Fixed: on the settings screen, the Address and Label boxes on each bar item row are now the same length.

1.5.0

• Added: a third bar for logged-out visitors, switched on with its own toggle, alongside the User and Vendor bars. Until it is enabled, logged-out visitors keep seeing the User Bar as before.
• Added: a Sign in pop-up link choice that opens HivePress's own login window for logged-out visitors, falling back to the login page when the pop-up is unavailable.
• Added: a My profile link choice pointing at the signed-in user's public vendor page, or their HivePress user profile when profile display is enabled.
• Added: the Notifications for HivePress bell can now sit on the bar itself, opening its dropdown panel above the bar. Offered while that plugin is active; the header bell is reused when it is switched on, so both never fight over one panel.
• Added: icon size, icon weight, an optional icon background colour, and separate corner radius controls for each corner of the bar.
• Added: Font Awesome 6 and 7 icon names, including brand icons such as Stripe and PayPal, with the full Font Awesome stylesheet loaded once and shared with this author's other plugins.
• Added: quick links at the top of the settings tab that jump to each section, with dividers between sections. The descriptions have been shortened, the section descriptions now wrap at a readable width instead of stretching across the window, and the hover tooltips are wider so their text no longer breaks into ragged slivers.
• Changed: the screen size options are named Mobile, Tablet and Desktop again.
• Changed: the counter Badge dropdown only offers counters whose plugin is active, judged at the moment the screen is built, and stored choices still survive a temporary deactivation.
• Removed: the separate Notification badge checkbox, which duplicated the per-item Badge dropdown. A site that had unticked it keeps its intent: the migration clears every stored badge choice.

1.4.6

• Fixed: no PHP warning on a renamed install folder. If the plugin folder had been renamed, which is what downloading the source as a zip produces, HivePress raised "Array to string conversion" once per request on sites with no paid HivePress extension.
• Fixed: the bar no longer highlights the wrong item when the address carries a query string. On Plain permalinks every page has one, so using the search box lit Home and left Browse dark, and screen readers were told Home was the current page. The most specific matching item now wins, so a plain address still highlights Home as before.
• Fixed: other plugins can now place their own pop-ups above the bar correctly. The bar publishes its height as --hp-action-bar-offset, which is set only at the screen widths where the bar is actually on screen, so nothing has to guess the breakpoints. Notifications for HivePress and Social Proof for HivePress both use it.
• Fixed: the bar's front-end script now ships as readable source rather than a minified file, so the behaviour above can be read and checked.
• Fixed: deleting the plugin now also clears the update check's own leftovers and cancels its background update check.

1.4.5

• Fixed: the Notification badge section on the settings screen still named the counters the way they were named before 1.4.0, so its explanation disagreed with the Badge dropdown sitting directly beneath it. It called "Account activity (HivePress)" by its old name, "All notifications", and said nothing at all about "Unread notifications", which that same release added. The wording now matches the three choices actually offered and says when each one appears. The feature list and the badge question in this readme have been corrected the same way.
• Fixed: the same explanation said the "Unread messages" counter is offered only when "Store messages in the database" is ticked under HivePress, Settings, Messages. It is offered whenever the Messages extension is active; that setting decides whether the number is ever anything but zero, not whether the counter is on the list. Corrected in both places.

1.4.4

• Fixed: saving the settings tab erased an item's destination, badge or custom icon whenever its source was temporarily unavailable - a page moved to draft, a page belonging to a deactivated extension, a badge counter whose extension was switched off, or an icon saved in the beta's free-text box. Such values now stay selected in the dropdown, marked "(currently unavailable)", and carry on working when their source returns, as the section description always promised.

1.4.3

• Maintenance: regenerated the translation template so the 1.4.2 "(no title)" page label is translatable; no code changes.

1.4.2

• Added: Notifications, and any other account page an extension adds, now appear in the item link dropdown. The list was built from the account menu, which some extensions only register on the front end; it now reads the routes as well, so nothing is missed.
• Fixed: a published page with no title showed as a blank, unidentifiable choice in the link dropdown. It now shows as "(no title)" with the slug the link would point at.

1.4.1

• Added - the rest of the WooCommerce account area to the list of things a bar item can point at. Only Placed orders and Cart were offered before; Subscriptions, Downloads, Addresses, Payment methods and Account details are all there now, along with any account page another plugin adds. They are read from the registered endpoints rather than from the account menu, because that menu is built for whoever is looking and leaves out anything they personally have none of.

1.4.0

• New - "Unread notifications" as a badge counter, showing the real unread count from Notifications for HivePress. Together with the Notifications page, which the bar already offers as a link, this is what lets you put the notification bell on the bar.
• The existing "All notifications" counter is now called "Account activity (HivePress)". It has never counted notifications from the Notifications plugin: it is HivePress's own combined counter, which Messages, Bookings and Marketplace add into. Nothing about what it counts has changed, and any bar item already using it keeps working exactly as before.
• The new counter is only offered where Notifications for HivePress is active, and a bar item set to it shows nothing rather than quietly counting something else if that plugin is later removed.
• The bar's height is now published as a --hp-action-bar-height CSS variable on the page root, not just on the bar itself, so anything that needs to sit above the bar can read one value instead of measuring the element. Notifications for HivePress 1.2.0 uses it to keep its pop-ups clear of the bar on phones.
• Each bar item now carries its badge source as a data-badge attribute, so a plugin that owns a counter can keep it up to date without reloading, and without any risk of writing its number into somebody else's badge.
• Fixed - "View details" is back on the Plugins screen. WordPress only offers that link for a plugin that has told it about itself, and this one stayed quiet whenever there was nothing to update to, which is almost always. The details popup, its changelog and the donate link inside it were all unreachable from the Plugins screen as a result.
• Fixed - checking for updates no longer holds up an admin page. The check ran while WordPress was building the Plugins screen, so on a site with several of these extensions one page load made one request to GitHub after another and could sit there for many seconds, once, before behaving normally again for hours. The check now runs in the background moments later. Pressing Check for updates still asks GitHub straight away, because you are waiting for that answer.

1.3.3

• Checking for updates no longer reports "Could not reach GitHub" when nothing is wrong. GitHub allows a server only a limited number of anonymous update checks each hour, shared by every plugin on the site and, on shared hosting, by every other site on the same server. Running out is ordinary, but it was reported as though the site could not reach GitHub at all. Update checks now read the release from github.com, which sets no such limit, so the message no longer appears. If the limit is ever reached by some other route, the notice now says so plainly instead of blaming your connection.
• A failed update check no longer hides an update that is genuinely waiting. The last successful answer is kept until a later check succeeds, so a pending update stays on the Plugins screen instead of disappearing for an hour.

1.3.2

• Fixed: the author shown on the Plugins screen now reads "ChrisB @ HivePress Community", matching every other extension in the range.
• Removed: the thank-you line under the settings form. The "Donate" link on the Plugins screen and in the plugin details popup is the only place the ask appears now, so it never interrupts you while you are configuring the plugin.

1.3.1

• The Donate link on the Plugins screen now uses a star icon instead of a coffee cup, which reads more clearly at that size.

1.3.0

• The action bar can now be shown on desktop as well. Tick the new "Large screens" box in the Display section, alongside the existing small and medium screen toggles. It is off by default, so nothing changes unless you turn it on. Suggested by the community.
• On large screens the buttons gather into a centred dock rather than stretching the full width of the window, which looked stranded on a wide monitor.
• The support link on the Plugins screen is now labelled "Donate" with a small coffee cup icon, matching the wording WordPress itself uses.

1.2.0

• New frosted glass effect. Switch it on in the Display section to make the bar semi-transparent and blur whatever scrolls behind it, with adjustable opacity, blur strength and an optional soft light along the top edge.
• Deleting the plugin now keeps your settings unless you tick the new "Delete all data" box in the Removing the Plugin section. WordPress shows its own warning on the delete screen for every plugin, and it does not apply here unless that box is ticked.
• The unread messages badge option now only appears when the Messages extension is active, so the list no longer offers a counter that could never show anything.
• Checking for updates before any release has been published now says so plainly, instead of reporting it as a problem reaching GitHub.
• Added a quiet support link for anyone who would like to say thank you.

1.1.0

• Each item's notification badge can now show either of HivePress's two unread counters: the combined notification count (messages, bookings, and orders) or the unread message count alone. Items ticked in earlier versions keep the counter they were already showing.
• The plugin now registers with HivePress correctly even when its folder is renamed, for example after installing a source download from GitHub.
• The colour settings fall back to a plain hex box on HivePress versions older than 1.7.26, and the settings copy now notes that hex codes need all six digits.
• If every Vendor Bar item is removed, vendors now see the User Bar items instead of no bar at all.

1.0.0

• Initial release.
• Automatic updates from the official GitHub repository through the standard WordPress Plugins screen.
• Settings from the beta versions are migrated automatically to the new repeater-based item settings, and the beta per-item options are removed. Custom icon classes from the beta are no longer editable in the settings screen; set them with the hivepress/v1/action_bar/items filter instead.