Hi @banishthem,
Sorry to hear of the problem you are having.
I visited your site http://www.jaden-fox.com/ and found it’s displaying some javascript error messages in the browser console which may be conflicting with this plugin.
You can also see these javascript errors in the browser console.
In Chrome go to “View -> Developer -> Javascript Console” and in Firefox you can go to “Tools -> Web Developer -> Console”
Find information about how to open JavaScript browser console :
http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/8525/how-to-open-the-javascript-console-in-different-browsers
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Your_Browser_to_Diagnose_JavaScript_Errors
This can also be due to plugin/theme conflict.
To find find out plugin/theme conflict you can just try on your development site using default WordPress theme like Twenty Thirteen and deactivating all other plugins as displayed in the following flowchart to know which theme/plugin is conflicting if any.
http://premium.wpmudev.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Support-Process-Support-Process.png
Kind Regards,
WPMU DEV
Hi,
I duplicated the site on my local server to do the troubleshooting (used your flowchart). I was able to find a plugin (Feature a Page Widget) that was conflicting with the edit mode loading on your plugin within the WP widget area so that takes care of that issue.
I deactivated all plugins besides yours, reactivated them one by one making sure to check the effects with each one, and got no results with sidebar content showing. I then changed the theme to a standard one and the problem persisted. The sidebars are still assigned to their respective pages, the content (and their widgets) is just missing from both the WP widget area and the live site.
I did use the developer tools to find the javascript error:
Uncaught TypeError: undefined is not a function in line 1 of a script.js file…
I’m not sure where to go at this point as my knowledge in JavaScript is pretty limited.
Hi @banishthem,
Thank you for your reply and glad you could find out the conflicting plugin that was conflicting with the edit mode.
I have tested on my test site deactivating and reactivating the custom sidebar plugin but it’s working fine after reactivating and displaying the same widgets in the custom sidebar before deactivating it.
After reactivating it, I noticed that the sidebars were missing on most of the pages on our website.
The sidebars are still assigned to their respective pages, the content (and their widgets) is just missing from both the WP widget area and the live site.
Do you mean the custom sidebars are displaying fine but the widgets contained in it before deactivating the plugin are not displaying in the custom sidebars?
If yes then are these widgets moved in to “Inactive Widgets” section in the widgets page?
Could you please tell me a bit more details about the issue that you are having by sharing the page links and screenshots of the issue so that i can help you to resolve it?
For screenshots, you can simply provide a link to an image through Google Drive, Dropbox, screencast.com, http://imgur.com/ or other image service. 🙂
Regards,
Vinod Dalvi
Do you mean the custom sidebars are displaying fine but the widgets contained in it before deactivating the plugin are not displaying in the custom sidebars?
If yes then are these widgets moved in to “Inactive Widgets” section in the widgets page?
Yes. I checked the inactive widgets and none of them were the content within the sidebars prior to deactivation. Here’s a screenshot of what I’m seeing in the dashboard for the custom sidebars: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Y-Gn_R087Eb05iV2tpWGo2ZVU/view?usp=sharing
I even tried adding inactive/active widgets to the sidebars to see if any content would display on the website sidebar but it was still blank like this: http://www.jaden-fox.com/about/
I also checked to make sure that “Allow this sidebar to be replaced” was checked in the primary widget area.
Is the content data stored somewhere where I could retrieve it and repost into the sidebars?
Any news? This same thing happened to me. I deactivated the plugin, then reactivated and all the custom side bars are there, and still assigned to correct the pages but all the widgets have been deleted. They are not under the inactive widgets and they did not get moved to a different side bar. They are just gone. Sadly i put a lot of work into those custom sidebar widgets. Is the data somewhere that i can retrieve it? Or am i forced to start over… in that case, i hate to do the hours of work again and have it delete them again.
Hi @banishthem,
The data regarding which widgets are assigned to which sidebar is stored in the wp_options table in your WordPress database having option_name as sidebars_widgets and the content stored in these widgets along with their settings are stored in the same wp_options table having separate option_name for each widget as following.
widget_categories
widget_text
widget_rss
widget_search
widget_recent-posts
widget_recent-comments
widget_archives
widget_meta
widget_calendar
widget_bp_core_members_widget
widget_cp_course_calendar
and so on….
I even tried adding inactive/active widgets to the sidebars to see if any content would display on the website sidebar but it was still blank like this: http://www.jaden-fox.com/about/
The shared page is displaying search and recent posts widgets what is not displaying there?
Please advise.
Regards,
Vinod Dalvi
Hi @vinod,
I apologize for my delay in response. Things have been a little hectic.
The shared page is displaying search and recent posts widgets what is not displaying there?
That is displaying due to us using the primary widget area built into WordPress and not the Custom sidebars. I’m now able to get content in the custom sidebars to override the primary widget area which is good but recovering the original content prior to deactivation is the most important.
I went to wp_options and went through all of the widget tables and only found a fraction of the content we had in the custom sidebars.
Hi @banishthem,
The data is stored in the table as described above. If you have a backup of the database then you can try retrieving the data from it and if not then i don’t think there is any way to recover it.
As said i couldn’t reproduce the issue on my test site.
Could you please just test it on the fresh WordPress test install using only custom sidebar plugin and the default WordPress theme and let me know how it works for you?
Also tell me more information about your test environment like which version of WordPress & plugin you are using and whether you are using multisite or not so that i can reproduce the issue on my test site and resolve it.
If you have changed the theme and lost the widgets in the sidebar then please read the information provided in the following reply.
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/new-theme-custom-sidebars-turns-into-nothing?replies=11#post-6425112
Regards,
Vinod Dalvi
I hate to hijack this thread, but this exact thing just happened to me and I wanted to contribute incase others came along.
I was trying to see why the live preview area wasn’t working so I started to deactivate and reactivate all the plugins. It ended up being the custom sidebars plug-in causing the issue. So when reactivating your plug-in, which was the last one I reactivated, it purged everything inside the sidebars, just like the screenshot in the above post. Luckily, I have a database backup or I would’ve lost 3 months of work.
I did read before installing that the sidebars were unlimited which is good because my client needed a lot of them, probably around 60 if not more. ( crazy I know, but it’s an enormous website. )
In conclusion, I believe this was the issue why the Live Preview wasn’t working under customize for my theme, it was trying to load all the sidebars. The Live Preview took 5 minuets to load, and eventually did. The website on the other hand is fast.
Do you suspect that there really is a limit to how many sidebars you can have before it goes crazy on deactivating / activating and purges everything? This is really scary for those without backups.
