winglimit

I don’t know what the original issue was, but maybe someone will benefit from this post.

Solution

Log in to your SQL database (using phpMyAdmin, etc.) and go to your wordpress database. Locate the wp_options table and find the field option_name.

Check option_name and press the browse icon. In option_name, locate the entry for the offending widget (in my case it was widget_nws-featured)* and DROP the entry.

When you create the widget again from the dashboard, WP will re-create the entry and it should work fine.

*not 100% if it was widget_nws-featured or a (blank) entry named frontpage_featured_widget_area. I deleted both for good measure and everything worked fine.

Gotcha. I’ll give it a go.

Thanks again for all of your help Ipstenu.

Ok, I got it working:

I had to recreate the htaccess file and paste in the code from Network Admin -> Settings -> Network Setup

which is curious because there was no htaccess file before, I’m even looking through my backups. Oh well.

Now to try to move my child site up into root again…

WordPress is installed in Applications/MAMP/htdocs

MAMP is a program for automatically installing apache, mysql, php for Mac. Apache config files are in /MAMP/conf/apache and other config files are in similar subdirectories. The htdocs directory is the default directory for apache documents (index.html, etc.), so that won’t change.

There wasn’t an htaccess file originally in the root directory when it worked, but I did some searching and found an (essentially) blank htaccess file in my hard drive’s root containing only #BEGIN and #END tags for WordPress.

Do I need to create an htaccess file now and put it into the root directory of the WordPress install even though it wasn’t there before?

I don’t want to give out my actual URL, but the urls were like

https://domain.com (default)
https://domain.com/foo/
https://domain.com/bar/

and so on like that.

(edit: showing hidden files is set to true in Finder, so it’s not as if I couldn’t see .htaccess, it literally wasn’t there. By default Apache is set to ignore the htaccess file in OS X for some reason, so that may explain why it wasn’t there)

Yes, all of the child sites are 404’d.

There was no .htaccess file in the directory, I’m running on Mac. .htaccess is elsewhere and didn’t change.

Yes, I changed the blog I modified back to domain.com/blog

Yes. Network admin and my “default” site works fine, it’s just the child sites that give a 404.

Thanks for your quick response. I re-saved the permalinks for my site, but that didn’t help. Any more ideas?