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.
