including image assets in widget

I’ve written my first simple WP widget– it all works fine, but I’d like to dress it up a bit, and add an image / logo in the widget display code.

How do I package the widget (which is just a single PHP file) with the image, and where will the image be stored in the WP site (so I can create the img tag link correctly)?

I know I could easily host the image externally and just “hotlink” to it from within my widget, but that seems a little hackish.

Thanks

It sounds like you’ll need the plugins_url() function which generates the URL for the plugins directory and can handle any alternate configuration (such as if you moved it to the /mu-plugins/ directory, a personal favorite of mine). The Codex documentation is good, but here’s a quick example.

• Let’s say you’re making this in a plugin that in /wp-content/plugins/my_awesome_widget/.
• To make the example slightly more interesting, you store all associated images in /wp-content/plugins/my_awesome_widget/assets/images/.
  • Your image is called company_logo.png.
• In the root plugin directory is your main plugin PHP file which needs to reference the widget.

So to get the image, you’d use a snippet like this:

<?php printf(
    '<img src="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/98621/%1$s" alt="{YOUR COMPANY} logo" />',
    plugins_url( '/assets/images/company_logo.png', __FILE__ )
); ?>

If all goes well, that will print out:

<img src="https://example.com/wp-content/plugins/my_awesome_widget/assets/images/company_logo.png" alt="{YOUR COMPANY} logo" />