WordPress widgets not saving or dragging?
Last Updated on Monday, 26 April 2010 09:01 Written by Simon Nicol Wednesday, 10 February 2010 04:50
I would love to say that I’m such a genius that I can solve problems in my sleep… It’s TRUE. Really I’m not kidding. This is the funniest bug I’ve ever fixed.
1st Try this:
Appearance > Widgets
Then at the top right of the screen you should see a tab that says Screen Options. Click on that, then a link will appear in the top left of your screen that says ‘Enable Accessibility Mode’ and click on that and give it a try.
Hopefully your Widgets will be working now. If not then it’s probably down to your theme, not all themes are born equal. Below is one of the more ‘quirky’ problems I had…
1st. I couldn’t drag any widgets at all – they were stuck, but a little later (about half an hour) – I was able to move them.
2nd. After I was able to move them, then I found that none of them would save.
Solution!!!
After much discussion with Esmi (a site moderator at WordPress) who was very helpful with numerous suggestions I finally ran out of ideas.
Until – Boom! A sudden flash of inspiration struck me (I love it when that happens!)
It’s IIS7′s Output Cache!
Being new to IIS7 and to Windows 2008 Server, I had gone to several websites to find out how to set it up. It turns out that one website I had been to was providing very, very wrong information.
I had the .php extension in IIS7′s Output Cache and it was killing WordPress’ AJAX calls. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT put the .php extension in the Output Cache. It will be the cause of all sorts of intemittent bugs!
I would like to thank Esmi at WordPress as Jakub Baran of RocketTheme for their time and assistance on this matter.
*Original Post*
Get ready to laugh – I fell asleep with my widgets page open – I woke up a few hours later and not only can I now drag n’ drop, they’re also saving!
That’s right kids!
I recon the problem is with JavaScript code taking an enormously long time to execute. There’s obviously a bug with the widgets JavaScript programming for this particular theme (mind you Jakub Baran of RocketTheme.com was also helpful with his suggestions).
Firefox is known to be substantially faster at running Javascript than IE so you will see the bug more often with IE than with FF – though it does affect both.
Unless you want to re-program WordPress or trace through your PHP install, all you can do to solve this problem is to go to your Widgets page on your WordPress install and then just walk away – that’s right! Go and have a snooze, make yourself a cup of tea have a bath or just read a book. And when you come back everything will be working perfectly.
Really this solution works I’m not kidding. Okay it’s not the best solution, more of a work-around, but it works!
Depending on the speed of your machine you might have to wait longer but for a decent machine at least an hour should do.
Please leave me a comment in the box below whether or not this solution works for you – just so there’s some evidence to the WordPress community at large that this really does work…
Simon
:)
P.S.
I’m going to give a quick plug for RocketTheme.com here because I think they deserve it. They really make some stunning looking themes/templates. Originally they were developing themes exclusively for Joomla! They looked so good that it inspired me to install Joomla on my system and start using CMS’s. Now and – fortunately for most of us – they also develop themes for WordPress that look just as good as their Joomla counterparts.
So if you’re a blogger or even a professional web designer I strongly suggest that you take a look at RocketTheme – they also have very friendly and helpful support staff – even when I’m stressing out over matters like this.
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A friend of mine found you on google. I am having trouble saving adsense code on my text widgets in wordpress. It use to work and now it doesn’t. The damn little icon just keeps going and the save never completes. Any suggestions?
Hey Marsha,
I had the same problem, you might find that it’s your theme. If you switch to the WordPress Default you’ll probably find that your code starts working and the widget text is saved (at least that will show if it’s the theme or not). You might want to try the ‘All in One Adsense and YPN’ plugin, which I use on this site though I hand coded for the Ad banners above on this post – in order to keep this site looking professional I didn’t want ad banners appearing on every post and in fact my homepage has none at all. I have a category in my posts called Adsense, if a post belongs to that category then the Adsense banners appear at the end of the post.
You can download the plugin from here.
If you want to know how to do the category check like I do in the post above let me know and I’ll post the code for you, but you will have to get your hands dirty a little bit dirty with PHP.
Simon
Enabling accessibility mode helped with the problem…I never knew it was there.
Thank you,
You are a genius Sherlock Holmes or both for finding that.
It was driving me nuts (actually more nuts than usual)
Cheers
Thanks for this useful advise… time solved the problem ;)
However, to speed things up, after reading your article, I simply logged into IE instead of Firefox and could continue working…