Disappearing Widgets

Hi Eric,
When changing the site’s URL or migrating, I recommend using the Search and Replace for WordPress Databases Script, as suggested by the WP Codex.
This is needed because of the method used by WordPress to save serialized fields into the database, so it’s not an issue strictly related to our plugin, which uses WordPress API for saving its data, in the exact same way used by the WP default text widget.

If you have a dump of your database taken before the migration, I can help you with the ‘re-serialization’.

As for the lost widgets without migration, are you able to tell if you made some operation that may have affected the database, such as plugin / themes updated, etc? I need a way to reproduce the problem to investigate it.
If you can provide a database dump before and after the problem appearedm I can take a look into it, but I think the cause is probably not in our plugin itself.

re-serialization doesn’t work in this case. I don’t have a backup from before updating any plugins anymore. I expected you to say ‘it’s not our plugin’ but I disagree. No other plugin is having this problem and I have used quite a few in the 30+ websites I have using WP. The stock widgets use the same serialization and don’t have this problem. The only changes I have made to the sites this is happening on was to upgrade a few other plugins which I can’t give you the names of as I didn’t notice this had happened at the time of upgrading them. I would be willing to let you in to one of them to take a look if that helps. I have one that is not currently a live website (on a domain) that would be fine to let you in without chancing a live website break.

Hello Eric,
I fear that there may be some plugin having an upgrade procedure that erroneously breaks the data of our plugin, even without breaking its own data. This may happen if there are search/replace batch operations that may affect records in the wp_options table.
As for the stock text widget, you can take a look yourself into the code and you will see that the way used to save the data is exactly the same. By the way they both do not explicitly serialize the data (i.e. with maybe_serialize function), as this is an operation done by WP internal API.
Unfortunately it’s almost impossible to debug a similar issue without a way to reproduce the problem.

You may send us the credentials to access your test site, or even better, provide a full backup of the site (files + db). Contact us using this form.

The only plugin(s) that i can think of would Ultimate Tinymce and Contact Form 7. Those update pretty frequently and are the only two that upgraded recently as far as I can tell. I would really like to help get this fixed as I like this plugin alot. I will be sending files and data through your form. I understand the difficulty of debugging without reproducing it. I have another installation that has not gone through the updates and I am going to try and reproduce this on that site by updating each plugin one at a time and see what the results are every time. It’s not live and is an almost exact duplicate of one of the ones that got messed up. I will save a copy of the files and data from before and after during that process.

I have tried many ways to reproduce this and have failed. I am going to replace the old data from a backup sql I have and move forward.

NOTE: I did use the plugin ‘WordPress Move’ while changing directories of an installation that had BSTW in use, and it transferred seamlessly.