Last month, popular Instagram plugins (WP Instagram Widget and Instagram Slider Widget) have been removed from WordPress.org repository. That affects our premium WordPress themes since they use these plugins to integrate users’ sites with their Instagram accounts.

Why are Instagram plugins removed from WordPress.org?

The reason that the plugins are removed because they’re using a technique to scrape images from Instagram account, which is forbidden on WordPress.org. This is a response from Scott, the plugin author of WP Instagram Widget plugin):

It was removed without my consent unfortunately and it will not be re-instated to the .org repository due to the approach the plugin uses for obtaining data.

Scott – Author of WP Instagram Widget

The same reason is given for Instagram Slider Widget.

In our opinion, after scanning the plugin’s source code, we think the technique is fine. There’s no security or performance issue with that. Probably, the WordPress.org staffs think scraping content from a website is not a good approach, and that violates the WordPress.org plugin guidelines. But it works just fine in this case.

How to install Instagram widget in your WordPress site?

Because they’re completely removed from WordPress.org and the author can’t restore them back, there’s no way to install these plugins directly from inside WordPress Dashboard anymore.

To fix this problem, we have created mirror version of these plugins and store them on our websites, so you can download and install them to your website.

Here are the download links:

To install the plugins, please go to Dashboard → Plugins → Add New, then click Upload Plugin button:

Then select the .zip file that you downloaded from either link above. Then click Install Now. After that click on the Activate button to activate the plugin.

That’s all. Now you can go to Dashboard → Appearance → Widgets or Customize → Widgets and add the Instagram Widget into a sidebar in the theme.

The screenshot below shows how the widget appear in the Customizer of our EightyDays theme:

Conclusion

Plugin removal is a bad news for all WordPress users, including GretaThemes’s users. While waiting the authors to fix the problem and restore their plugin on WordPress.org, the temporary solution is download them from our links above and install them manually.

We hope this article helps you go over this bad-experience in a good way. If you have any question, please let us know in the comments.