Not picking up certain parameters after update to 1.24 from 1.22

Hi mpower9,
regarding the excerpt, make sure you’ve selected “The excerpt” in the relevant dropdown menu and enter 70 as value in the appropriate field. This feature is working fine in all my sites.

Regarding the font size of the title, it’s only a matter of CSS rules. I’ve seen your sites and noticed that the HTML elements are not the same, so a rule, that works on testing.oldlaborhall.org doesn’t work on oldlaborhall.org. For example, there is no element with .front-main selector in oldlaborhall.org (while it’s present in the testing site), so the rule

.front-main .pis-title {text-align:center; font-size:150%;}

does not work.

Try adding this rule instead:

#pis_posts_in_sidebar-9 .pis-title { font-size: 150% }

This rule targets only the intended title (in the box at the center of the screen), without affecting the titles in other widgets.
Please note that if you delete this widget and create another in its place, the rule won’t work anymore because the id #pis_posts_in_sidebar-9 will be changed into #pis_posts_in_sidebar-10 or another number, so you will have to update the rule accordingly.

Let me know, please.

Thank you for your help. I implemented your suggested rule:

#pis_posts_in_sidebar-9 .pis-title { font-size: 150% }

, but it did not take.

I had already done what you said to do for the excerpt. Neither of the suggestions took.

Since I had done a batch of updates all at once (I won’t be doing that again), I decided to try them one at a time in the test site (which had not been updated except for WordPress which is updated automatically by the hosting service), I first updated the theme. My theme is a child theme of Make Plus. Then I updated Posts in Sidebar and the main front widget completly disappeared just like it did on my live site. The small front widgets are still there. Looking like they did before. As you can see the main widget content is gone.

To make it come back on the live site, I had to delete the sidebar and put in a new sidebar with the Posts in Sidebar widget. But it still won’t take any of the format modifications.

We are trying to fix https://oldlaborhall.org/ , right?
If so, the CSS rule is currently applied and it’s working correctly – the title of the main box (the title “Call Out the Troops! Norwich Cadets Volunteer”) is 150% larger.

About the excerpt, check if in the post editing page the excerpt box contains this phrase:
“Norwich University cadets volunteer at the Old Labor Hall on annual MLK Day of Service.”
If so, this is the excerpt defined by the author of the post – the plugin grabs this text and cannot display more words. If you delete this text in the post editing page, the plugin will grab 70 words from the post (if you correctly set up the options in the wwidget).

Let me know, please.

Thank you so much. I think cashing was preventing me from seeing the increase in the size of the title. It looks just fine now.

As for the excerpt, you are absolutely right. I did have a custom excerpt in the excerpt box. I did not realize that the contents of this box was what the widget picked up. That is wonderful. Now I have my choice of just having the first paragraph or having a custom made excerpt. This is even better than I thought. Your troubleshooting has been stellar. It is tough being a little old lady webmaster. Your help has made it much easier.

Great! Thumbs up!