Help: links to all pages appear in the footer

Hello,

This is murderous. It’s a mystery. I am at my wits’ end.
One Hour and Ten Minutes later…

1. Switched themes — tried it with Astra – works, the problem’s gone away, tried it with the Twenty Twenty-One – works perfectly, the nuisance is gone and then
2. Tried it with the Twenty Twenty (!), that’s the theme I have, and the problem is gone as well, works perfectly.
But the nuisance reappears the moment I switch back to my child theme (Twenty Twenty child theme).
I tried – removing everything from my child theme and replacing the contents with fresh files. No effect.
copying everything in the TwentyTwenty (parent) theme and pasting it into the child theme folder – no effect, like nothing happened.
erasing everything and creating a new child theme – zilch, nothing.
Disabling all the plugins, and clearing out the cache. Same story, zero effect. The nuisance remains.
Removing everything from the “additional CSS” field in the customize area. Appearance –>Customize, ->Additional CSS. I had changed the color of the fonts there. So now I’ve just cleaned it all up, deleted everything just as it used to be at the installation. And nothing.

What can be causing this? I am going to leave this as for the time being (at least until tomorrow) but then I’d have to figure something else out. I am loath to change themes because I got used to this one, and I am puzzled by all this. Not that I’ve done anything to cause this. And the problem is not present in the parent theme but only in the child theme, even if I copy the contents of the parent theme file by file, one by one. And, again I am not that bright, and I am no coder and don’t know much (actually anything) about WordPress inner workings but this mess defies reason, it makes no sense, not to me at least.

Thank you.

Solved.
I am just posting this (I wrote it in the Twenty Twenty forum) just in case if some unlucky soul would have the misfortune of stumbling into the same problem.

If you link to all your pages suddenly appear in the footer area, check your menu selector (Appearance>Customize>Menu>View All Locations). Then set it back to whatever you want. That’s it.

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It’s tricky because you won’t necessarily look into the “View All Locations” section on your own. You’d have to open it up, it’s hidden out of your view by default.

If unwanted links appear in the footer menu area, go to the footer area and check the selector. If it’s set to nothing, then the WordPress (or the Twenty-Twenty theme) would display everything, that is everything, everything, everything. You might have had set this to “nothing” (to blank space) either accidentally or, as it might have probably happened in my case, a different theme has done it — I was fooling around with themes and templates before I settled back on the free version of the most basic Twenty-Twenty theme. So that’s when it must have happened. Just set it back to whatever you want or to “Select” (if you choose “Select” then no items will be displayed in the menu footer and that’s what I wanted).

That’s it.
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Here is the response I wrote in the Twenty Twenty support forum.

Thank you. It did not help directly, but it gave me an idea that, in turn, has led to finding a solution. So in a way you’ve sold the problem, which, the problem that is, may be a bug either of the Twenty-Twenty theme or of the way WordPress is set up.

The problem is not related to widgets. So if you or anyone of you suddenly see(s) links to all your pages appear at the bottom of the screen, chances are this has nothing to do with the widgets but with your menus instead.

The menu selector (Appearance ▸ Customizing ▸ Menus) has three positions for each location where a menu can be displayed, these are “Select” or the “Name of the Menu” you have, or the third one is just blank or “in between”. At least my theme has it that way. I’ve got four menu locations, these are the desktop menu, mobile menu, footer menu, and social menu (I have no idea what the social menu is, but that’s irrelevant). If you look at the footer area, it can be set to the Select (then nothing is displayed, and that’s what I want) or it can be set to “your menu” (the name of your menu or whatever you’ve made up, then it will show your menu items) or, it can be set to neither. Just a blank space, like it was in my case (for the Footer Menu English). So if somehow it gets set to neither, something that must have had happened inadvertently when I fooled around with different themes, switching back and forth, and then reverted to Twenty-Twenty because I don’t want to waste time on rearranging items on my blog – so when it’s set to nothing, then the footer area will display links to all the pages you have. To everything. The solution was to set it to “Select” (that’s what I did) and then it will clear all the unwanted items from the footer or choose some menu that you’ve made up and then it will show your menu items.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 3 months ago by fightingships.