Tristan Rineer

The fix for the empty divs is posted in This Thread (I didn’t come up with the fix, I’m just sharing it).

Essentially, the fix is to just overwrite widget-context.php with the code from Here (click the “Raw” button for easier select-all). I also recommend changing the version number in the new code to “8.1.1”, just to prevent accidental upgrades.

Since the pull request is yours, do you mind responding here with an update if/when it’s accepted?

I’m referring people to this thread when they ask me about the problem so they can make the choice to implement your fix on their own or just watch for the update.

Gene,

Thanks for the quick solution. It works perfectly.

I’ve been wanting to create my own widget management solution so I wouldn’t have to rely on a “third party” option, for this specific reason (potential bugs); it’s good to see that a bugfix was found so fast.

Afterthought:
Do we know when the fix might be merged into the main release? I’ve got clients that update their own sites and an “official” update would solve a lot of support issues.

I’m going to leave this as “unresolved” until an official update that fixes it, just because it’s technically not resolved until that happens.

Is there an alternative function to “is_dynamic_sidebar” or “is_active_sidebar” somewhere in the plugin code? As much as I prefer not to have my themes dependent on any third party plugin, I’d rather have a call to a function that works, over complaints from clients that they have “weird lines” on certain pages of their site because a sidebar without content isn’t being hidden properly.