Main Menu Nav

Hi People,

How can I start fresh? I have no main menu that will stay in place, this is an impossible, unacceptable scenario, no navigation for a visitor, site is really almost useless.

And the last top level entry to the main nav, when the menu is saved, it just falls off into space.

I am willing to just dump it all and re-install everything on a fresh domain. Would you all concur on that? Or how should I handle this?

Thanks,

B

Thanks for the reply.

Here’s the update … Saturday 11:15 AM EST / -5UTC.

1. SETTING. Made a clone/copy to a secondary domain, so that I/we could autopsy the site. The below-described work is done to the secondary test domain and WP Installation.
2. THEMES. Stripped down to 2012 & 2013.
3. PLUGINS. All plugins additional to a standard WP install were systematically deactivated and deleted, no change in problem.
4. PLUGINS. All have now been placed on FTP hold via renaming the WP Content > Plugins folder to Plugins.hold as per other WP Support Protocols.
5. WP FILES. WP Files have been re-installed numerous times via the Dashboard.
6. WP FILES. WP Files have been replaced via taking a fresh WP Files download, extracting files, then transferring via FTP Filezilla the WP-Admin & WP-Includes files to the secondary site location.
7. MYSQL DB: From the PHPMyAdmin area of the HG/CPanel, the database for this installation has been ‘repaired’ via selecting all tables in the database for this WP Installation and copy of the website, and then from the drop-down menu to the right selecting ‘repair table’.
8. MYSQL DB: Also, in this DB from another theme, I believe were ‘WP Cart 66’ files, these files were systematically deleted from the SQL database, and still no change to the functionality of the Menu System.

CURRENTLY. Still cannot add menu items … to the bottom … of the menu list, or when viewed visually, … cannot add menu items … the the last position on the right-hand side of the menu nav area.

For instance, the ‘Contact’ tab I would like to be at the far right-hand side of the menu nav bar … but, this ‘contact’ page will not ‘stick’ in that location. (???) In fact, no page will stick in the last (right-side) position.

MY THOUGHTS: There is no doubt faulty code in the files associated with menu navigation, but where and how to go from here is a tad beyond my ability, but I do follow instructions quite well :).

WEBSITE: Test Site … www. (***) beth (***) c — u — l — b — e — r — t — s — o — n (***) .net
WEBSITE: With Customizr Theme running … www. (***) happy (***) bunny (***) foods (***) .com (I don’t want search engines to grab my domain names from this location, so I broke up the domain name with ‘(***)’ to foil the search engine crawlers, I may be misinformed, or somewhat ignorant on this topic, but I’d rather take the precaution and be prudent.)

Thanks for any help and insight.

B

@rdelconsulting

Wow, okay 🙁 … thanks for that input. I have backups for sure, and I could do that … but I thought this would be a situation where we go into certain files that are associated with the menu nav php files or such and clean them up and pffft all would be well.

I cannot imagine that every time a bug or conflict occurs you have to rebuild your site???

I know where the the problem is occurring which should tell a techie/specialist in code, right where to go to fix le problem, I just don’t know how to fix it.

I am going to hope that ElectricFeet will have a suggestion, before go I ‘total recall’ on this operation.

Thanks for taking the time to put your comments in … greatly appreciated … rdel.

B

UPDATE: 2014-02-09 / Sunday / 11:30 AM EST / -5UTC

Unbelievable.

In the secondary test site, I started stripping the menus present down to the very basics, the thinking was to scale down to a simple menu with only the top level pages, which are at 6 pages.

Of the 5 menus that were present, first I started renaming them …
Menu – Desktop One
Menu – Desktop Two
Menu – Mobile
Menu – One
Menu – Leftover From Another Theme (whose name we shall not mention here, because we are in love with this theme!! LOL)

We see where in the SQL DB the menus show up in the wp_terms section of the DB.

In the course of this diagnosis, we are nosing around in the PHPMyAdmin and in the functions of the SQL Database, because we have been forced to take some interest in how this stuff works.

Ok, so we go into the database overall and we perform the ‘analyze’ … we ‘repair’ … and overall we find that the database is not reporting any error messages to best of our ability to discern these things.

I will add that we are dogged, determined, and so we go into a mental comparison mode, if it does this here, then xxx, and so on. This kind of thinking paid off when we delved into the menus, all five of them, looking for anomalies, to see which ones worked, which did not, and what were the differences between each of them.

AHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We found an anomaly. In Menu – Basic, carrying only the six top level pages, the place marker for the page ‘contact’ had no link to the actual page, it was essentially ’empty’ … how this occurred I do not know.

To test my theory, I deleted the last main nav entry of ‘contact’ with the empty linkage. I re-added the current ‘contact’ page ensuring there was linkage, … would the menu function save this menu addition/page to the menu this time, where in the past, it WOULD NOT save the addition to the menu??? It did save the amended/added page to the menu. Well, hot damn.

THIS WAS THE BIG BURP, THE HUGE HICCUP. Something so simple, this was like a beaver dam in the data flow. Damn. Crud. Crikey.

Catastrophe averted.

Thanks all 🙂

B

I will be testing a little bit further before I close this thread out … and if any of you techie types know what the the technical term for what this kind of conflict was/is … I’d love to know, for myself and for the sake of anyone else who has to travel this path.

This boo-yah has taken up the major portion of three days to arrive at what appears to be resolution.

UPDATE: 2014-02-09 / Sunday / 3:00 PM EST / -5UTC

SETTING: Working in the main website, on the menus with Optimizr Theme present, with plugins I could not part with present.

RESULTS: The problem with the menu presented again. Of the five menus, I started stripping out all un-necessary menus. Menu-Desktop-One and Menu-Desktop-Two … were apparently in conflict with each other. I had a hunch to just get over it and dump them both, which I did.

During the menu rebuild, with only two menus present, Menu-Basic and Menu-Mobile, the acceptance/placement on the drag and drop function, is noticeably faster, the save of the edited/amended menu is noticeably faster. Yay!

I stand by my last layperson synopsis, which is that, there is some scripting conflict between wp operations files and how they talk to the SQL DB.

I don’t think the SQL DB is ‘corrupt’ per se, there is/was conflicting data entered, sitting in the DB, then the command script comes along and says ‘do this’ with this data, and the command cannot be carried out because maybe the script cannot differentiate between two almost same/similar entries, … so best remedy in my mind, … was to delete the two menus, that refer to the same pages, … viola no more conflict, fresh slate.

Then menu is behaving now … I will report back on this … after some more time, and more use and building of site has occurred.

B

Grins … lol … so far so good … I’ll report in full tomorrow.