Jetpack 6.3: Introducing the Simple Payment Widget

It’s another month, and you know what that means: Jetpack 6.3 is now available for download! 6.3 includes a few improvements and bugfixes, but the main draw this month is a brand new feature: the Simple Payment Widget.

We highly recommend that you update your sites to the latest version as soon as possible.

Here’s what’s new for July.

Take payments anywhere on your site: introducing the Simple Payment Widget

In a previous release, we introduced the Simple Payment Button for Jetpack, which allows you to add a PayPal payment button to any new post or page. With 6.3, we’re making it even easier to create these buttons and accept payments or donations with a new widget.

With the Simple Payment Widget, you can now add a quick payment option to any widgetized area on your WordPress site. Just set up the widget via the Customizer (Personalize > Customize):

… and you’ll be able to add something like the below to widgetized areas like your sidebar, header, or footer. Here’s an example from a footer area:

This new option also gives you the ability to add and manage all of the products you want to accept payments for. To switch between products (or donations, services, or charitable causes), you’ll first need to set one up in a widget via the Customizer:

For each new product, you can add everything you can on a standalone Simple Payment Button, including a photo, description, and price.

Once one or more products have been created and saved via the Customizer, you can switch between them when adding a new widget or payment button. Just choose from the right button in the list when you’re setting up and you’re good to go!

We hope you enjoy this added feature! Let us know what you think of the addition in the comments, or reach out to support if you run into any issues setting up your new widgets.

More fixes and updates in this release

Aside from the Simple Payment Widget, we have a few other updates to share for 6.3. Here they are:

• Lazy Loading Images: We updated the behavior of Lazy Loading Images for visitors with JavaScript disabled. Images will still load and will not display blank spots on the page.
• Markdown: We updated the way we name the CSS class for <code> when attempting to specify a language for a code block. Prior to this release, you would receive class="language". Now you’ll get class="language-javascript" or the language you specified for the block.
• Site security and bbPress: We fixed a compatibility issue with the bbPress login widget that was causing unncessary redirects upon attempting to log in.
• Sitemap and formatting: We updated the date and time formatting for videos listed in the sitemap generated by Jetpack.
• Site Stats: And finally, we fixed the width of the Jetpack Site Stats page so it’ll look a little nicer on wide screens.

Update to 6.3 today

As always, the full changelog has more details on this update if you’re interested. If you’re ready to go, install Jetpack on your site or update to 6.3 now!

A big thank you to everyone who contributed to this release: Brad Griffith, Brandon Kraft, Daniel Walmsley, Derek Smart, Enej Bajgoric, Eric Binnion, Filipe Varela, Igor Zinovyev, Jacopo Tomasone, James Nylen, Jeff Bowen, Jeremy Herve, Michael Arestad, Michael D Adams, Michael Turk, Mikael Korpela, Oscar Lopez, Ramon Ahnert , Rocco Tripaldi, Rodrigo Iloro, Rolf Allard van Hagen, Steven Lin, Weston Ruter, and Yaroslav Kukharuk.

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