WordPress 3.0 Widget Bugs – Widgets Not Saving
Now that WordPress 3.0 has been out for a couple of months I have had the chance to use it on a couple of new websites. And I have to say, so far the experience has been pretty impressive. However, there seem to be some odd bugs in the widget system.
The bug presents itself when you try to add new widget areas to the site. At first everything seems to be working correctly and you see the widget areas listed in your WordPress admin, but none of the changes will save. No matter what, some of the widgets areas won’t save the widgets or options.
After a couple of hours of pulling out my hair trying to figure out why some of my widgets were working correctly and some were not I finally found the answer… For some reason WordPress 3.0 will not accept capital letters in the widget area IDs!
If you use IDs like “bannerOne” or “headerArea” your Widget Areas will appear to be working in the WordPress admin panel, but none of the widgets you add will actually save state. To get around this, you must convert all of your Widget IDs in the functions.php file to lowercase names and you may also need update your template if you call the Widget Areas by ID.
12 Comments On This Topic
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September 27, 2010 at 1:43 pm
nice! never crossed my mind to test that one…
December 23, 2010 at 1:04 pm
You are right, setting ID to lowercase solve the trouble. Thank you very much! you save me!
August 23, 2011 at 6:54 am
That was exactly it – thanks!
December 9, 2011 at 1:31 am
lowercase in the ID. i was screaming at the monitor. Thanks a lot for this.
December 22, 2011 at 3:37 am
Not sure which file. Do you mean wp-content/themes/name/functions.php?
February 20, 2012 at 10:35 am
You are a god. Thank you. Several hours wasted on this bug, and you solved it.
March 30, 2012 at 8:31 am
Thank you!!
May 14, 2012 at 2:11 pm
saved me alot of time thanx
May 28, 2012 at 12:04 pm
dude! i was soon to freak out trying to figure out why this was happening no matter what i did. saved me a huge headache – thanks so much for sharing this!
May 30, 2012 at 8:17 am
THANK YOU thank you 1000 times thank you. That has to be the stupidest rule ever.
July 25, 2012 at 2:04 am
Nice informative site and a good post,thanks for the share.
September 27, 2012 at 3:19 am
Kudos! You saved me hours searching for the bug.