Error message messing up my backend

I’m just wondering if a visual of the problem will help. This is probably easier than the screen grab, but I didn’t want to link to my site b/c it’s not live yet and won’t be until Feb 15th. Anyway, my site is https://thechristiandude.com . If you take a quick look, you’ll see that my menu has been migrated to the right hand side of the screen, it has erased all menu items, and added about 40 bulletpoints going down the right hand side of the page.

Didn’t know if that might help people visualize this better and propagate some different ideas. Worth a try…

PS- I did add this to the jobs board and will pay someone a reasonable fee (via Paypal) to resolve this for me, as I imagine it to be a quick and easy fix for someone much more competent than me. In the meantime, suggestions still welcome. I’m trying to figure out how to do the previously troubleshooting advised, but I’m a dummy with this stuff.

I looked at your site and it looks like something got messed up with the menu – an element around the menu is missing a CSS class that relates to the menu. Not sure how to fix that, but you could also try asking on the theme forums:

https://mysitemyway.com/support/forum/echelon

@WPyogi- THANKS! I am approaching this via the Trifecta… I am here, at the forum you linked to at mysitemyway, and working on it server side with the guys who manage my servers. That is a great suggestion though and I will bring that up in the thread I have working over there.

Still taking suggestions and willing to pay someone to resolve if we can’t get it figured it out though. ??

@alienalias
Since the error message problem has been solved you should start any thread with a topic more closely describing your current problem.
That will help others searching for menu problems.

I am marking this resolved and closing it.

Okay, I can answer the main questions here, but I have to tell you, there is some technical jargon involved. No getting around it.

Here’s the error messages you posted:

Warning: Unknown: open(/tmp/sess_ee22848894927abd6f905697457fa2cc, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13) in Unknown on line 0

Warning: Unknown: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/tmp) in Unknown on line 0

First, that error is coming from your webserver. Specifically, it is telling you that the session.save_path setting in the PHP configuration is set to a directory (/tmp, in this case), that you don’t have permission to write files to.

What does that mean? Bottom line: it means your server is configured incorrectly and you need to complain about it to your web hosting company. This is a problem in the underlying server configuration. If they won’t fix it or say that it is somebody else’s problem or that it is not supported in some way, then they are feeding you a total bunch of nonsense and I would highly recommend getting a better web hosting company in such a case.

Next, the problem with your menu not saving is also a server problem, but a different one. Basically, some servers have configurations that severely limit the number of variables that the page can send to them. The upshot of this is that when the menu you’re making grows beyond a certain number of items, it can’t send updates to it anymore, as you have discovered.

This is a known issue in WordPress. Recent updates have reduced the number of variables being sent, and thus increased the size of the possible menus on servers with these configurations, but the underlying problem isn’t exactly fixable by WordPress itself at this point in time.

The most common cause is using “suhosin” on the server with a configuration that limits the number of “post vars”. Changing the configuration to increase this limit, or disable it entirely, is the only real solution at present. Again, this comes back to asking your web host how they can help you.

TL;DR: Talk to your web host and say this:
– I need the web server to have PHP Sessions configured correctly (session.save_path).
– I need the web server to have display_errors set to “false”.
– I need the web server to have suhosin disabled, or configured to have a higher limit on the number of suhosin.post.max_vars.

They may say that you can do these things yourself via a custom php.ini file or via the .htaccess. Or they may say that they can’t do it at all.