Hi Jeroen,

So, this happened when deleting a sidebar, (the actual sidebar, not just removing one from displaying on one of your pages but really deleting the whole thing). Did you by any chance also add any new sidebars that contained special characters in the title / sidebar name? Like ” and ‘ and /

Also, could you be a little more specific on what has disappeared? The sidebars? The sidebars and menus? all your content?

Kevin

Hi Jeroen,

I believe this quote must be what has messed up the database. We’ve seen similar things happen earlier and are looking into escaping special characters like these from the sidebar titles. What you could try is to log in to your database and look for the table storing the sidebars. If the sidebar entry is still present there, removing that entry manually might solve your issue.

Kevin

Hi Jeroen,

First a hint, make a backup of your database before altering anything. This way you’ll be sure that may something go wrong, you can return to the prior state it was in.

Now, in your PHPmyadmin , open the database of your wordpres website.

From here, go to the search option in which you just type the name or a word from the name of the sidebar you’ve added. (preferably the most destinctive word that will most likely not be featured in too many other searches). Hint: if the name was Jeroen’s sidebar. only search for “Jeroen” I believe everything after the quote that messed up the sidebars will not feature in the name that’s in the database.

Your phpmyadmin will return search results, hopefully not too many.

I’ve done this on another one of our themes but I believe this should be rather interchangeable. The table the sidebars appeared to be located in is the wp-options table. The option name is core_sidebars. click on the pencil icon to edit the entry.

I’ve added a screenshot of what the entry looked like in edit mode. Now what you want to do is look for the sidebar you want to delete. note how all sidebars are featured twice in the list. delete both those features. Also note how the entry starts with a:<number>: (in the case of my screenshot, a:9:). This number tells how many sidebars the list contains.

Now I’ve highlighted some things in the screenshot. as you can see, my custom sidebar in the example was called “zijbar” I’ve highlighted the exact part I removed from the entry (starting with s:8, ending with ; ) . After having removed that item from the list, I’ve also changed the total number of list entries (a:9:) to a:8: as the list features one sidebar less now.

I’ve hit “go” and the sidebar was removed from my database.

I hope this helps. Again, do keep a safety backup of your database to stay safe.

Kevin