Just did a url change and widgets are gone

Assuming you restored an amended database backup, are you using exactly the same theme. Widgets are stored on a per theme basis.

I think so. I have a twenty ten child theme. all my modifications came through that were on my child. I did have to change the background color and the header image back and that was it besides the widgets.

If you had to change the background color and the header image, then it sounds like your theme mods may have gone from your database.

no, all my theme mods are fine.
I had most of the html for my text widgets backed-up so i do not have a lot of work to recreate them.

I should be fine.

Thanks again for your help “theme diva”!
much appreciated!

Sorry – by “theme mods”, I meant that the theme specific modifications (like background, header & widgets) in the database have been lost.

then yes I guess those have been gone from the database or misdirected.

I have already pretty much rebuilt all my widgets so I am good.

But if you would like me to try something for the sake of others coming across this issue and need documentation of my scenario, no problem.

I ran into this issue after I did a find/replace of my domain name and path in the db. The reason i’ve discovered is that since widget (and other) options can be stored as php serialized strings, changing the length of the strings in the data breaks the unserialize process and the widgets no longer have valid settings arrays.

In my case it was easier to manually setup the widget again than it was to fix the issue by taking the original db backup, php unserializing the widget options strings, updating the php objects, reserialzing, and putting them back in the sql dump.

Hope this is informative!