Happy Addons Elementor Widgets

Please see my updated review of Happy Addons.

Happy Addons is a new Elementor plugin that adds more than 25 widgets and several animation effects.  The widgets each have several preset designs along with the ability to do your own detailed customizations.  There are some widgets that are not widely available, such as a Gradient Heading, Skill Bar, Review,and Step Flow widgets.  There are also a couple of nice animations: various CSS Transforms and especially the Floating Effect.  Happy Addons is free from the WordPress plugin directory and there are examples of the widgets and animations on the Happy Addons website.  Support and documentation seems limited.

Available Widgets

There are currently 24 widgets in the plugin.  Some of them, like the Flip Box and the widgets supporting various forms plugins are common in many widget collections.  However, there are several interesting widgets that are more unique that I took a look at.

Gradient Heading

The Gradient Heading widget is a nice heading widget that gives you the option to make the heading text display with a gradient.  It is easy to use and provides a nice dash of style. Here is an example of a gradient heading and here is the style part of the settings panel:

Review and Skill Bars Widgets

The Review and Skill Bars widgets could be used to create a review section.  Here they are side by side: The Review widget gives you the option to customize the image, the placement of the content elements, and whether the stars show as a number rating (shown above) or a line of stars.  You can pretty much customize every one of the elements. The Skill Bars widget can be used anywhere you want to show percentage bars.  You can define the number of bars, the labels and whether the labels show up outside of a thin bar or inside of a thick bar.  Oddly, you define the length of the bar as some number of “px” out of 100, though the bar length is not actually based on pixels. It is fairly easy to customize the look.

Justified Grid Widget

I was pretty interested in the Justified Grid widget because it has the option to add display filters.  It is basically a gallery widget.  You defined groups when you set the images and then you can filter the groups. This is how my Justified Grid looked in the Elementor editor: You can see that it has the option to adjust the size of elements to fill the row (hence the name).  On the front-end, the filtering works well. I had a bit of a problem that sometimes the styling wasn’t always applied to the filter buttons so they showed as a list.  I reported this to the developer.  This wasn’t an issue in my demo above.

Step Flow Widget

The Step Flow widget is an interesting concept.  You have a series of linked content boxes that are supposed to detail the steps of a process.  Two of the features of this widget that support that concept are the numbers (shown in the red bubbles) and the arrows.  I had to remove the “shafts” of the arrows because they didn’t line up with the points.  As with all of the Happy Addons widgets, there are a good amount of customization options.

Happy Effects

When you have the Happy Addons plugin active the Happy Effects section is added to the Advanced tab for all Elementor widgets. There are two sections, “Floating Effects” and “CSS Transform.”  The controls for these options allow you to make adjustments across the X, Y, or Z axis.  There is also a “Duration” control which controls the speed and a “Delay” control which adds a pause between animation cycles.  The options are a bit hard to figure out so I went looking for documentation.  Unfortunately, there isn’t any yet.  From my trial and error, “Translate” seems to move the element, “Rotate” turns it, and “Scale” changes the size.  Here is a look at the controls: Here are some animations I made while playing with the controls: The Floating Effects adds movement and adjust position, while the CSS Transforms adjust direction.  I used the CSS Transforms to change text direction: My examples are pretty basic, the examples on the Happy Addons website are more sophisticated.

Summary and Conclusions

I noticed is that there is not the ability to enable / disable individual widgets like a number of the most popular addon packs provide.  I submitted this as a feature request.  It is worth noting that I didn’t received any acknowledgement when submitting feature and support tickets.  Also, as mentioned above, there is no documentation.  These shortcomings suggest to me that this is a newish endeavor. The Happy Addons plugin for Elementor is a nice addon package.  It clearly shows some innovation and goes beyond the “not another flip box” repertoire.  I particularly like the Happy Effects features.  Though they are difficult to figure out, they increase the site builder’s ability to add engaging and attractive content.  My overall conclusion is that the Happy Addons plugin is a project to watch.  I suspect they plan to grow into a paid offering and consequently will need to address issues of support and documentation.