I’ve been busy playing around with AI again, and I’m excited to release the latest project that I’ve been working on!
Action Bar for HivePress
This extension adds a customisable, bottom navigation bar on mobile and tablet devices.
Examples:
After installing the plugin, you can find the Action Bar settings tab under HivePress > Settings to configure things how you like.
I’ve included helpful tooltips and built-in various options to try and give users the ability to get creative, so that we don’t all end up with clones of each other’s sites!
Features:
Fixed bottom navigation bar on mobile and tablet, with a separate on and off toggle for each device type
Up to 5 items per bar, added, edited and reordered with simple drag and drop rows
Optional separate action bars for regular users and for vendors, so each audience sees the actions that matter most to them
A smart link picker that adapts to your site and includes core HivePress pages, account pages added by your active extensions (for example Bookings, Requests, Offers, etc.), your own WordPress pages, WooCommerce pages (if active), or any custom URL
Icons chosen from the full bundled Font Awesome library in a searchable dropdown with live previews
Optional text labels, positioned above or below the icons
A Prominent style that lifts an item into a raised, highlighted circle, ideal for increasing engagement.
An unread message badge on ‘Account’ and ‘Messages’ items, powered by the Messages extension
An Account item that sends signed out visitors to the login page and signed in users straight to their account settings
Full colour controls for the action bar, icons, labels, active state, prominent circle and badge, with soft grey defaults and one click reset in case things go wrong whilst experimenting
Adjustable bar height between 44 and 120 pixels
The ability to hide the bar on any pages you choose, and automatically on the WooCommerce cart and checkout
Safe area support for iPhones with a notch design
Notes:
If you use a performance plugin that delays JavaScript, try excluding hivepress-action-bar-frontend, if you encounter any issues.
If you decide to give it a try, I’d love to hear what you think, and if everything works smoothly on your end. Bug reports, questions and feature requests are all welcome in this thread.
Happy HivePress-ing!
Cheers,
Chris
P.S. If this extension saved you time or money, consider buying me a coffee! Sharing these tools for free takes a lot of time and resources, and your support helps me keep doing it for the community.
Thanks so much for taking the time to share this solution with the community. I’m sure many HivePress users will find it useful and inspiring.
We really appreciate community members like you who share ideas, solutions, and experience to help others build and improve their projects. Thanks again for contributing!
Aww, thank you so much – I really appreciate that!
It’s awesome being part of such a supportive community. HivePress has been a huge help for my own projects, so I’m happy to give back where I can.
I’m actually still in the process of cooking up quite a few more ideas for extensions. I keep thinking of improvements, and I need to test everything works and fix a few bugs, too. However, I’m quietly confident that the ones I’m excited to share soon will certainly go down well with the community!
A couple of updates since the original post, and this one brings the biggest visible change so far.
New
A frosted glass effect. Switch it on in the Display section and the bar turns semi transparent, blurring whatever scrolls behind it for the look phone apps use. You can set how solid the bar colour stays, how strong the blur is, and whether a soft light runs along the top edge. It is off by default, so nothing changes until you want it.
Each item now picks its own notification badge. HivePress actually keeps two separate counters and the bar used to choose one for you. All notifications shows the combined count that messages, bookings and orders all feed, and Unread messages counts messages only. Items you had already set keep the counter they were showing, so nothing moves on its own.
Your settings are now kept if you delete the plugin. Deleting used to remove everything. It now leaves your items and colours in place so you can reinstall and carry on, unless you tick the new Delete all data box in the Removing the Plugin section. WordPress still prints its own warning on the delete screen, and it prints that for every plugin, so the new section explains when it applies to you.
Changed
Custom URLs containing a space or an accented character were being quietly damaged when saved, so an address ending in a%20b arrived as ab. They now save exactly as you type them.
If you switch the vendor bar on but leave its items empty, vendors now see the standard User Bar instead of no bar at all.
The colour boxes take a typed hex code as well as the colour wheel, short codes like #fff are expanded for you, and a colour left blank no longer saves itself as black.
The update check no longer sends your site address or your WordPress version to GitHub.
A lot of the help text has been rewritten. Anything that catches people out now sits next to the setting it affects rather than being buried in the readme.
If this plugin saved you time or money, consider buying me a coffee. Sharing these tools for free takes a lot of time and resources, and your support helps me keep doing it for the community. Thank you!
Hey Chris, this is such a good looking menu bar!
Tested it on staging, looked perfect - then deployed it on booking platform with almost 200 vendors inside. So far looking perfect! Good job!
Only one thing that i can suggest - from our stats 99% of our vendors are logging and managing their profiles through desktop not mobile devices. If option that includes desktop action bar for the vendors can be added, that would be freakin’ awesome!!! So you can think about that in the future.
So far it is great! Thank you so much for the effort
Hey @ChrisB, that was super quick!!! Thank you for listening to my feedback and adding the option for desktop action bar! It is looking super nice - updated and enabled the new option
Tidier settings screen - the thank-you note under the settings form is gone. The “Donate” link on the Plugins screen is the only place the ask appears now.
Consistent plugin details - the author shown on the Plugins screen now matches the rest of my extensions.
Badge Wording Now Matches The Badge Dropdown - The Notification badge section still named the counters the way they were named before 1.4.0, so the explanation disagreed with the control directly beneath it. It called “Account activity (HivePress)” by its old name and never mentioned “Unread notifications” at all. That third counter only appears when Notifications for HivePress is active.
Correct Advice On Unread Messages - The same paragraph said that counter is only offered when message storage is ticked. It is offered whenever the Messages extension is active; storage only decides whether the number is ever anything but zero.
The Right Item Lights Up - When a web address carried anything after a “?”, the bar could highlight Home instead of the page you were actually on, and screen readers were told the same thing. On Plain permalinks that meant every search. The most specific match now wins.
Pop-Ups Can Sit Above The Bar - The bar now publishes its height, and only at the screen sizes where it is actually shown, so Notifications for HivePress and Social Proof for HivePress can place their pop-ups clear of it rather than on top of it.
Removing the plugin now also clears the update check’s own leftovers.
A Bar For Logged-Out Visitors - A third bar with its own toggle, alongside the User and Vendor bars. Until you switch it on, logged-out visitors keep seeing the User Bar as before.
Sign In Pop-Up And My Profile Links - Two new link choices, one opening HivePress’s own login window, the other pointing at the visitor’s own profile page.
The Notifications Bell On The Bar - The bell from Notifications for HivePress can now sit on the bar itself, opening its panel upwards.
More Control Over Icons - Font Awesome 6 and 7 names including brand icons such as Stripe and PayPal, plus icon size, icon weight, an icon background colour, and a separate corner radius for each corner of the bar.
Changed
Screen Sizes Are Mobile, Tablet And Desktop Again - The previous labels have gone.
The Notification Badge Checkbox Has Been Removed - It duplicated the per-item Badge dropdown, and the Badge dropdown now only offers counters whose plugin is actually active.
Fixed
The bell’s panel now opens directly above the bell, centred on it, instead of at the far right of the screen.
The bar’s bell and the header bell now work side by side, instead of one of the two going dead.
Reaching the settings from the HivePress menu without picking a tab first now draws the quick links correctly, and two extensions from this range no longer stack two sets of controls on one tab.
Every Font Awesome icon - the icon picker now offers the whole free Font Awesome 7 set, brand icons included, which is around 800 more choices than before.
Changed
Type to find an icon - the picker searches as you type rather than making you scroll a very long list, and every result still shows you the icon itself.
Lighter pages for your visitors - icons are drawn straight into the page instead of loading a font, so a visitor’s browser no longer downloads roughly 230 KB of stylesheet and font files just to show a few small pictures. Your colour, size and weight settings work exactly as before.
A faster settings screen - the icon choices are fetched as you search instead of every one of them being written into the page.
An item with no icon of its own could take the icon of the item above it when the settings were saved, which came in with the icon library in 1.5.12. If any of your bar items gained an icon you did not choose, correct those rows and save once; items that already had an icon were not affected.
Live preview - A panel to the right of the settings draws your logged-out, user and vendor bars with the settings on the page, following every change as you make it. The bars are drawn at the width of the panel, so drag its edge to see them wider, with the tablet and desktop layouts taking over as it grows.
Tablet and Desktop previews - Choose Tablet or Desktop above the panel to see the bars at those exact widths in a slide-in preview, with Mobile alongside them to return to the page; a bar that is switched off for a size says so instead of drawing.
Changed
Items as cards - Each bar’s items are now shown as cards matching Account Menu Enhancer, with the item’s icon and label on the header and the fields folded beneath it; click a header to open or close a card, and drag its handle to reorder as before.
Fixed
The Link and Icon fields inside the cards were narrower than the rest; all fields now fill the card.
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.
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. So a vendor’s profile can carry Call, Email and Message buttons for that vendor, and a listing page can carry the listing’s own contact details.
Contact attributes as buttons - The page bars’ dropdowns add the listing’s and the vendor’s email, phone and website attributes. Each opens as an email, a call or a link, with the attribute’s name as the default label, and is left out on a page where the attribute is empty.
Social links as buttons - With the HivePress Social Links extension, every social link switched on for listings or vendors is offered too: a WhatsApp number opens a wa.me chat, Telegram a t.me link, Viber the Viber app, and profiles such as Facebook or Instagram open in a new tab, each with its brand icon by default. A link the vendor has not filled in is simply not shown on their page.
Message pop-up - An item that opens the Messages extension’s send-message window for the listing or vendor on screen. Logged-out visitors get the sign-in window instead, and the item is left out for the owner.
Badge size - A new Badge size setting under Display. The counter overlaid on an item is now a 24px circle with bold text, matching the counters in the site header and account menu; set it to 16 if you prefer the smaller overlay from earlier versions.
Notifications on the Display section - The Display section now names Notifications for HivePress, which gives the bar its bell and unread badge, with an Install or Activate link when it is missing.
Changed
Badge colour - The badge background now defaults to the same red HivePress uses for its own counters. A site still on the old default is moved across once; any colour you chose yourself is kept.
Tooltips - The help icon now sits directly after each label and its tooltip opens to the right at full width, the same placement used across every extension in this family.
Fixed
Settings tab critical error - Saving an item whose icon is one the icon library knows but HivePress core’s own list does not, such as “circle-plus”, left the Action Bar settings tab showing a critical error on every load. The row now keeps its icon and the tab loads.
Typing an item’s label drew a broken glyph beside the card’s icon.
Click here to download Action Bar for HivePress
