Specials Characters Must Be Escaped (Custom HTML Widget)

You can’t just drop PHP code into a widget. I wrote a shortcode ([year]) to deal with that, if you’d like to copy it.

https://github.com/sterndata/sdsplugin/blob/master/sterndata-plugin.php#L132

I’ve used the same plugin to put PHP into widgets for years without any issue, and I actually have a seperate widget with PHP tags that is not getting this error.

Then use that widget! Allowing PHP via widgets seems, to me, to be an incredibly insecure thing.

By the way, I went to https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/php-code-for-posts/ and found that the plugin has been removed from the repository. The author’s view of what happened can be found on his own web site.