Widget Area Not Working with WordPress Version 4.5

Hi zeichner

If there’s a jquery conflict it’s definitely NOT this plugin. It doesn’t use any Jquery or any Javascript. Whatever you are experiencing must be due to something else – possibly the widget you are using.

To verify this – deactivate this plugin (of course the widget in the sidebar will no longer be there – so add it temporarily to another sidebar to see if it was the widget causing the problem).

All is fine on my local and remote sites in wp 4.5.

It’s actually a very simple little plugin:
https://webdesign.anmari.com/3061/a-simple-little-plugin/

Hi Anmari,

Thank you for the quick reply, but I’m thinking that is has to do with something related to the installation and activation of the plugin. The widget area was working perfectly immediately prior to the installation and activation of the plugin, so it almost seems to be related. I’ve deactivated and uninstalled the plugin to no avail, so I’m kind of at a loss as to what happened. I do believe that it had something to do with a jQuery conflict, so maybe it has to do with another plugin that currently active, but I didn’t have any issues until the shortcode any widget plugin was installed. Regardless, I’ll deactivate the other installed plugins one by one to see if I can pinpoint the problem, but if it persists, I’ll let you know.

Thanks again!

Do please let us know what you find out.

When debugging these odd things, bear in mind also might be something with the theme and/or sequence of activation (although that’s not common, possibly memory)

Actually it would be good to know what theme you using and if problem goes away using a wp default theme (I test with default themes). Themes create sidebars and if it’s NOT a js/jquery thing, then it might be that the theme is doing something different when creating their sidebars and that that gets highlighted when this plugin adds its sidebar.

Thanks for the quick response!

I tried to activate different third-party themes (aThemes Sydney Pro ver 1.37, to be specific), along with the default WP themes with no luck, so it doesn’t appear to be a theme issue. I also deactivated some of the recent plugins that were widget-related to see if that made a difference, but still no change and it remained looking like a jQuery issue since the widgets still couldn’t be dragged nor opened.

So, I figured it had to be in the database somewhere since that was the only area unchecked. After uninstalling the plugin and deleting it, I found a record related to it in the database that contained some serialization code. I didn’t delete the record, but I did revert the database to a backup version that I had just before the plugin installation and everything came back to normal (a good reminder to everyone to backup the database before any plugin installation… the 30 seconds of time with phpMyAdmin can save hours of work). I can’t remember what the value was, unfortunately, but after the uninstallation and deletion of the plugin, I searched for “amr” in the database and found the lingering record. Hopefully, it’s something that you can dig into a little bit and find a solution for, as well, since the plugin looks pretty awesome and could definitely a lot of folks like myself in the future.

Thank you again!

Hi zeichner, well that’s all very puzzling. I’m unable to recreate anything like what you describe on various local and remote systems using a a variety of themes.

As noted before this plugin doesn’t have any Jquery or Javascript.

Also if you had any of the versions from the past year or so, they were not using any stored options in the database. ‘Existence’ of an option cannot cause a problem – there would have to be code that reads the option and does something with it. The version about to be uploaded will have an option but it is not an ‘amr’ named one and this option will only save what widgets are in the shortcodes sidebar and reloads them if one switches themes.

Since I cannot recreate what you describe, one is left to think that whatever it was is unique to your system. IF you can recreate the problem, I’d be happy to logon to your system and check it out, other than that there is nothing for me to ‘dig into’ – all is working fine on wp 4.5 and 4.5.1 alpha