I still don’t know why post isn’t showing and why even if I put an echo in the IF statements that handle the post they don’t show, but somehow the post is still updated.
I did find out what was wrong with my other widgets though. I was using filter code to strip out any unwanted characters that I didn’t write correctly and therefore returned null every time.
Once I fixed that, I was able to get the widget to work properly though testing it was a pain due to not being able to see Post values.