Following last month’s big redesign, we focused this next release on a few new widgets and several performance improvements and bug fixes.
New Widgets
This release makes three new widgets available for use on your site:
- EU Cookie Law Banner widget: allows you to display the standard confirmation required by EU law that gives site visitors the ability to accept site cookies.
- Flickr widget: allows you to show a stream of images from a Flickr account.
- Internet Defense League widget: allows you to add a widget for visitors to show their support for the Internet Defense League.
These widgets have been available to WordPress.com site users for a while. Their inclusion in Jetpack further improves compatibility between the two platforms, particularly for users choosing to switch from one to the other.
Improvements and Bug Fixes
Included in this release are a number of small fixes and changes to improve compatibility and robustness, including:
- Removing unused code and increasing our unit tests and overall code coverage.
- Plugin updates now trigger the in-built WordPress maintenance mode for additional security.
- Brute force protection doesn’t conflict with other plugins using the login form and better supports IPv6 addresses.
- The Contact Form doesn’t auto-activate if Ninja Forms is already activated.
- Fixed a problem where some Tiled Gallery images were appearing distorted when using Photon.
- Better MultiSite support for Stats and displaying full list of sites.
Full Changelog and Thanks
As always, the changelog provides the full list of updates and changes in this release. We value—and respond to—your feedback so please get in touch or leave us a comment on this post with any questions or suggestions.
Install Jetpack on your site or upgrade your current version today and let us know what you think.
Thank you to the contributors to this release: Andrew Duthie, Brandon Kraft, Daryl L. L. Houston, Derek Smart, Elio Rivero, Enej Bajgoric, Eric Binnion, Filipe Varela, George Stephanis, Ian Dunn, Igor Zinovyev, Jacopo Tomasone, Jeremy Herve, Jonathan Sadowski, Joseph Scott, Kerry Liu, Lance Willett, Marko Andrijasevic, Martin Remy, Michael Turk, Miguel Lezama, Payton Swick, Rob Landers, Rocco Tripaldi, Sam Hotchkiss, Stephen Edgar*, Thomas Guillot, Xiao Yu, Yoav Farhi.
* Special kudos to these Jetpack users who helped us find and squash these bugs!
Pro Tip: Personal plan customers benefit from priority support and faster assistance.
Jetpack 
The changelog link has moved on .org. it’s now under developers, which points back to this article.
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Thanks for the warning! I’ve updated the link accordingly.
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Just updated three sites to use Jetpack 4.9,
EU Cookie Law Banner, Flickr & IDL widgets nowhere to be found. Neither under Appearance>Widgets, nor anywhere in Jetpack>Settings. Where are they hidden?
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Could you go to this page in your dashboard, and make sure the Extra Sidebar Widgets module is active on your sites?
https://yoursite.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=jetpack_modulesLet us know if it helps!
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Same issue here… shouldn’t it be possible to enable/disable a feature without entering in a URL manually? This seems like something that should be part of the settings page.
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@Jeremy: How can we find this menu without knowing the “admin.php?page=jetpack_modules” URL?
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Hi Jeremy, why is this page hidden to us? I missed it since few updates?
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@Kelson @j0e @bildmanufakturwackernah Thank you all for the feedback! We moved away from the full module list in Jetpack 4.8, in order to make things less overwhelming and easier to understand for new Jetpack users. You can read more about the redesign and our goals here.
Our work isn’t over though; we keep iterating, and we’re continuously making more changes based on all the feedback we receive from site owners like you! We realize that page is still useful, and should be easier to access (the only way to get to the page right now is to know the URL or click a link at the bottom of the “Debug” page in your Jetpack dashboard). We’re discussing some possible improvements in GitHub issue. Feel free to chime in with your ideas!
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Hi Jeremy,
Followed your suggestion and yes, now I am able to add the widgets. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: please don’t go all Microsoft on your users by oversimplifying the user interface. A large part of your userbase pretty much knows what they are doing.
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Thanks for the feedback! I added your remark to the GitHub issue where we’re discussing those changes.
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The Internet Defense League widget badge is HUGE, any way of resizing it or being able to select a smaller size?
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It should be automatically resized to match your sidebar width. If that doesn’t work, send us an email and we’ll take a look!
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I have it showing on the bottom of my page, so maybe that’s why it’s large then?
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It could be, yes! If you’d like us to take a closer look, don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll help you resize that image.
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Yeah, I’d definitely like it smaller. It just sticks out like a sore thumb being so large at the bottom of the page and all. I can search and find the image and resize it manually, but I’d prefer it if there were a different way. I have it showing on the sidebar for most posts and the larger size doesn’t seem so bad there, it’s just where it’s at the bottom that it’s too large.
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