I am trying to make a simple widget to show some icons. The widget will only have icons. The problem I am having is that for some reason wordpress widget preview won’t display them. Here is the code.

class Widget_Links extends WP_Widget {
    public function __construct() {
        parent::__construct('simple-widget', 'Simple Widget', $options);
    }

    public function widget($args, $instance) {
        echo $args['before_widget'];
        Plugin::show_links();
        echo $args['after_widget'];
    }

    public function form($instance) {
    }

    public function update($new_instance, $old_instance) {
    }
}

There is obviously some kind of mechanism in wordpress that doesn’t display a preview if there is no content. if I echo some content along with it the icons display fine. So obviously there is no css issues or anything like that.

public function widget($args, $instance) {
    echo $args['before_widget'];
    echo 'Hello';
    Plugin::show_links();
    echo $args['after_widget'];
}

I am currently using font awesome for the icons. I am just using css but ive tried adding the svgs directly also but no luck. It works if I add them in an image tag but then I have no control over the fill/color ect. So my next thought would be to just add some content if it’s in a preview window with $this->is_preview() but for some reason it always returns false. So I’m all out of ideas.

Anyone else experienced this issue? Any help here would be appreciated.