widget sidebars no longer working

Okay, so I sort of solved the immediate problem by using the internet archive to find prior versions of my website. So I could copy and paste that into the sidebars.

Something is making my sidebars, which were done in original paragraph mode (before there were blocks) disappear. I can’t create new paragraphs using original mode either.

With the blocks I also can’t figure out how to have a different text background color (i.e. highlight in any color other than the default yellow).

And I can’t figure out how to have text next to the images in the sidebar the way it used to be. Copying and pasting didn’t copy over that feature.

This is odd because my other website (www.BrainChampagne.com) uses pretty much the same everything and that one still works fine.

I misspoke. I deactivated all plugins. Didn’t help. Instead of doing it one by one I deactivated all of them. I’d figured if that helped then I’d reactivate half to narrow it down, then keep cutting in half, etc. A little faster. But since deactivating all of them didn’t help I figured that wasn’t the problem.

I also tried switching to the parent theme, and that didn’t help either.

My guess is that the newest version of WordPress turned off sidebars that were with the old paragraph style instead of blocks. Which kind of sucks because that was so much easier than using blocks. It was just like a page from a word processor, which I thought was the main selling point of WP over html.

Anyway this is not a criticism of your theme, which I like very much and use on three websites. Strangely, another of my websites still works fine with its sidebars (third one has no sidebars).

Since I managed to copy the info from an older version of my website from the Wayback Machine I’ve got all the data and it’s okay now. I still can’t figure out how to have text next to an image the way I used to- I’m not sure if I put in html at the time. I did it several years ago and have forgotten what I did. I tried copying the html from the wayback machine page but that didn’t work.

Wordpress 5.8
Virtue Theme 3.4.5 but I’m using a child theme and it says that’s version 1.0.0. Am I correct in my thought that it’s the parent theme that gets updated and the child theme goes along with those updates?

Mostly stuff you’ve helped me with!

Here’s all the custom stuff (plug-ins listed below but I already tried turning them all off and it didn’t help):

.current_page_item a {
 color: #000000 !important;
}

.topbar-widget {
    text-align: center;
}

.kad-topbar-right {
    width: 100%;
}
.kad-topbar-left {
    display:none;
}
.kad-topbar-right .textwidget p {
    font-size: 38px;
    line-height: 60px;
    margin-bottom: 0;
}

#nav-main ul.sf-menu ul li a, #nav-second ul.sf-menu ul li a {
width: auto;
display: block;
padding: 5px;
color: #ffffff;
text-align: left;
font-size: 16px;
}

.sf-menu a {
padding-left: 0px;
padding-right: 20px;
}

.sf-menu ul {
background: #0000ff;
}

input.wpcf7-text {
    height: 20px;
    width: 200px !important;
}

aside.col-lg-3 {
background: #D3D3D3;
}

.page .entry-title { display: none; }

.page-header {border-top: none !important; border-bottom: none !important;}

.page-header {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}

.wrap.contentclass {
    padding: 0;
}

.contentclass {
    padding-top: 0;
}

div#logo {
  max-width:175px;
  margin: 0 auto;
}

.page-id-28 h1 {
line-height: 22px;
}

.page-id-66 h1 {
line-height: 22px;
}

.page-id-72 h1 {
line-height: 30px;
}

.page-id-72 h2 {
line-height: 22px;
}

.page-id-54 h1 {
line-height: 26px;
}

.page-id-54 h2 {
line-height: 20px;
}

.page-id-173 h1 {
line-height: 26px;
}

.page-id-173 h2 {
line-height: 24px;
}

.page-id-28 h3 {
line-height: 18px;
}

.page-id-44 h1 {
line-height: 22px;
}

.page-id-44 h2 {
line-height: 24px;
}

.page-id-178 h1 {
line-height: 26px;
}

.page-id-178 h2 {
line-height: 24px;
}

.page-id-51 h1 {
line-height: 26px;
}

.page-id-51 h2 {
line-height: 24px;
}

.sf-menu ul li {
background: #2ECCFA;
}

.sf-menu ul li:hover {
background: #d80a34;
}

@media (min-width: 992px) {
    .main.col-lg-9 {
    padding-right: 40px;
}

And these plug-ins:
1&1 WP Wizard

Advanced Editor Tools (previously TinyMCE Advanced)

Select Favicon by RealFaviconGenerator

Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights

Kadence Blocks – Gutenberg Blocks for Page Builder Features

Kadence Importer

Lazy Load for Videos

Limit Login Attempts

Max Mega Menu

Virtue/Ascend/Pinnacle Toolkit

W3 Total Cache

WP ADA Compliance Check Basic

Yoast SEO