Ampersand:WTF happened to my widgets ?!!!
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I just spent half an hour re-setting them because of having changed the theme, and everything was hunky dory.
But when I went to the site (as opposed to the preview), every bloody widget had disappeared.
Re-setting widgets with theme changes has become a nightmare.
Time for you to fix this problem, Automattic support !!!
It would take me so long to recreate them all that I’m going to have to return to the previous theme.
Thanks a bunch.The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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When you switch themes, sometimes the new theme does not have the same widget areas as the old one did. WordPress puts the widgets without matching widgets areas in the Inactive Widgets or Inactive Sidebar areas so you can move them to your desired widget area in your new theme. The widgets and their settings aren’t lost – just drag them over to your new widget area and they’ll be redisplayed. Here’s a screenshot:
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Thanks, Elizabeth – I do understand all that.
What I DON’T understand is what happens when I’ve completed assembling all the widgets by dragging them out from their hidey-holes and ensured everything is there in the sidebar … and by that time several of them have replicated themselves amongst all those unused widget sections, so I delete the replicants …
And everything simply vanishes !!! -
I’m Kathryn. :)
Sorry to hear some of your widgets are misbehaving! Does your sidebar have the widgets you want at the moment, or do any still need to be moved out from one of the other sidebar areas? If so, which? It might be easiest to simply copy-paste your content from the text widget into a new one if one of the widgets in the “Inactive Sidebar” areas is not behaving well.
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And I’m a halfwit. How d’you do ?! :-(
Sorry, Kathryn – not paying attention. I have just smacked myself on the hand.
I’ve finished with recreating my widgets, as the only one I haven’t re-done – a fairly tricky gallery – is outdated now.
But this happens almost every time I change themes; and I do that fairly often (I get bored easily). The widgets lodge themselves into various of those unused areas – which I wish could be removed entirely – and then replicate themselves all over the place. The replicants are more numerous than the actual sidebar, most of the time; and when they’re removed, EVERYTHING disappears.
There must be some way of preventing this from happening, surely ?
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The widgets lodge themselves into various of those unused areas – which I wish could be removed entirely
If you’d like to delete a widget completely from one of the Inactive areas, you can open it up there in the Inactive area and click the Delete link:
If you no longer have any widgets in that Inactive Sidebar area, the entire sidebar may go away – I’ve honestly never seen one of these “Inactive Sidebar” areas before and I’m not entirely sure what series of interesting steps led to one appearing, so you’d have to try it out and let me know!
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Good heavens ! – you’ve never seen one ?
Well, as I intend to change themes again shortly (Sobe doesn’t show categories in posts), I’ll keep some screen grabs for you, Kathryn.
Deleting the replicant widgets from inactive areas isn’t the problem; ensuring that doing so doesn’t ALSO delete the original widgets is.
It’s the only but the huge problem … -
Sorry ! – I let that Other One in.
One of the reasons I’m closing down my second blog: it’s too tiresome trying to remember who I am at any one time. :-) -
JESUS CHRIST !! – in Mirror, all my carefully-produced widgets are gone before I actually do ANYTHING !
Except two –
http://snag.gy/PoVTQ.jpg
http://snag.gy/Z5XBm.jpg
– which as you can see are replicated.
EVERYTHING ELSE HAS GONE !!!
I think I’m going to have to slash my wrists. -
http://snag.gy/8qjkl.jpg
replaces the first faulty screengrab.
I can scarcely believe this; hours of work have been swallowed by the way widgets are dealt with when changing themes, but this is the first time a WordPress theme has actually DELETED widgets before I’ve even got to them.
Whoever designed Mirror – tell them I hate their guts, please. -
I’m sorry you’re continuing to have trouble with your widgets.
Since you have many text widgets and you like to switch themes frequently, I’d highly recommend that you copy out the content of your text widgets and keep them safe and sound in a plain-text document. That way you’ll be able to copy-paste them anew anytime, without worrying about losing them. Notepad is a good plain-text editor in Windows. Save the document as plain-text (.txt) and keep it handy.
If there is some widget content that you’ve lost that you’d like to find, I’d recommend looking for it in Google archives. You can do that by searching for your URL in Google, then clicking the little arrow to the right of the URL, and clicking the word “Cached”: https://cloudup.com/cJrRxi-C_Dt You can do that with any page that comes up in the search results. If there’s a specific one you’re looking for, let me know which one it was and what page it was on (link would be helpful) and I can try to help you locate it.
I think that in the long term, if you plan to continue trying out new themes regularly, keeping a copy of your text widgets in a text document is the most surefire way to go.
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