widgets no longer working please help

I would bet you just updated to WP 4.8?

The plugin seems to be not under active development anymore, and 4.8 changed the Widgets, which the PI can’t handle.

You could try a rollback to 4.7.x to get it to work again.

Sorry ??

Yes indeed. Bummer. I have just seen in all the review comments that I am not the only one with this problem. This sucks since this plugin has basically no uninstal function so just disabling it will leave the database in a big fat mess.

Rather than rolling back and being stuck on an old relsease of WP, are there any hacks out there to bring back the widget functionality? Does anyone know what has been changed in WP 4.8.

Or are there other plugins that replace qTranslate-X and that can simply update the database to their syntax?
Thanks again for your coomments …

BTW, I am not offered to update to 4.9. Does anyone have any experience with this? While I can no longer edit my widgets in 4.8, at least they are still displaying all the different languages, how about in 4.9? Thanks.

Sorry, but on my page the plugin works fine and without problems under WP 4.8. Maybe it’s a code conflict into your theme. And did you see that WP 4.9 (in english) is available now?

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by Phil Beckershoff.

Hi Phil,

so you are running 4.8 and when you are in appearances -> widgets and you change the content of a widget body, the multi-linguality is preserved?
Just to clarify, my widgets are still displaying the different languages in 4.8, I just can”T edit them anymore as all other languages would be overwritten by whatever edit I am making.

If you can still edit yours that is good news. This would mean that I should simply identify a problem in the theme and fix it. I did alter my themme considerably, so perhaps this is the reason. I am using a child of the hemingway theme. Cheers

@phil-beckershoff
BTW, I just tried it on another site I have, using a clean install with an unmodified hemingway theme and no other plugins and it is definitely broken. Which theme do you use Phil?

One fix I found is to include the language tags in the widget body like so:

[:en]Testing English[:de]Testing German [:fr]Testing French[:es]Testing Spanish[:]

It’s ugly, but at least it works and you can still edit your widgets.

… Jep, it also works on my page when I customizing the content of a widget body (tested in the meantime). Sorry and all the best.

Hello olliontheroad,

if you want to clean the database, the qTranslate X Cleanup and WPML Import plugin might work for you. At least the cleaning part worked for me, then I started to manually recreate the translated pages. I tried it about a year ago, though, it was a test only. At that time the WPML import didn’t work for me, hopefully next time it will work.

I am planning to migrate to WPML as qTranslate-X is not supported anymore and from WordPress 5.0 with the Gutenberg editor it won’t work at all!

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by weigertj.

Hi weigertj,

ok thanks for the tip. I had tried that plugin on a dummy database and it seems to leave the English version intact. But considering that I manually need to copy-paste all other languages into new pages anyway, I might as well do that for English too and not risk have the plug-in mess up the database in some unforeseen way. For now (i.e. before the glorious Gutenberg editor ruins it entirely), you can use an html text widget and use the language tags directly in there, like: [:en]Enlgish[:fr]French[:de]German[:]. The normal text widget will give you an error but in the html formatted text widget it works. For now …

WPML looks good but it’s not free and just another plug-in, so after my experience with WordPress and abandoned plug-ins, I was actually thinking to drop WordPress altogether and move to a stand-alone site. It’s actually not that hard I think and this would not only make the site leaner, as you get rid of all the excess WordPress ballast, but it also means less maintenance … funnily enough.

While the reason to initially go with WordPress was to save time, i.e., to have the CMS automatically adapt to new web standards and SEO requirements, etc., with all these pointless changes to the core code (à la Gutenberg), it has the opposite effect now. Having to constantly adapt my site to these changes is a big fat waste of time. Plus I 10 times prefer to edit my webpages in UltraEdit or Sumblime rather than in this useless WordPress editor which has no syntax highlighting and where you need to install a plug-in so you can insert PHP code (I mean really?!?).

Well, this has turned into a bit of a rant, but as a sole business owner, I actually do have to spend some time on running my business rather than managing a CMS that should be managing itself, so v4.9 of WordPress will be the end point for me …

Good luck with WPML …

Hi olliontheroad,

thanx for the widget tip, but I don’t use widgets at the moment in the multi language part of my site.

80% of the themes supports WPML, thus I think it is a good solution for those sticking to WordPress. WPML has 500,000 users.
A stand-alone site is a good solution, if you don’t have thousands of images and lots of blog posts. Unfortunately, my sites are quite complicated, thus a CMS is a good solution for me.

Good luck to your new site!