Hi Marilyn,

Can you tell us which Theme version and which WordPress version you currently are using?
Thanks in advance,
Helen

I’ve just experienced a very similar problem, unfortunately just as I’m rushing to finish this project for a meeting Monday…

In my Sidebars, so far I just had the defaults provided by the theme (Default Left, Default Right, Footers 1 through 6), and I had added one called test1. Fine. Today I started created new ones for specific pages, but could only create one before running into trouble. I created a new one, saw it added to the list (on the theme’s Sidebars admin page). When I click into Appearance>Widgets, I saw it at the bottom of that list too. Great! I returned to the theme’s Sidebar’s admin page and added another new sidebar — this time with an apostrophe in the title, if that makes any difference? This time, clicking on the Add button did nothing. I refreshed the page and all sidebars were gone. I checked the Widgets page and they’re gone there too. All my sidebars disappeared, and now I can’t add any because the “Add” button seems to not work now.

If anyone knows what to do, please tell! I’m in a crazy rush and did not expect this trouble. Thanks!

Footers are also gone.

I did npt make any other changes to the theme or anything, it was working one minute and it was broken the next. I was adding new sidebars when it happened, via the Appearance>MikMag>Sidebars page. The first new sidebar I added was OK, it seems, and then I tried adding a second one with an apostrophe in its name. That’s when the “Add” button stopped working, and all my sidebars/footers disappeared.

Another li’l bit of information in case it helps:

On my main Appearance>Widgets page, I actually see three of my missing sidebars near the bottom of the page instead. They’re each called “Inactive Sidebar (not used)”, and they contain widgets I’d previously placed inside. Under the title there’s a message: “This sidebar is no longer available and does not show anywhere on your site. Remove each of the widgets below to fully remove this inactive sidebar.”

I can’t drag them anywhere though. I don’t know how these became inactive, or how to activate them now.

Footers remain missing entirely. I had not yet placed any widgets in those.

Argh!

Hi Rich,

The detail you’ve pointed out that the one that appears to have messed things up contained an apostrophe in the name is something I find very interesting. What I believe might be happening is that due to a code bug in the theme the apostrophe is not being escaped. This causes the “gathering” process where the theme grabs all the available sidebars to stop at the wrong point, causing the code to stop processing.

It would make sense to me that that would be why none of the sidebars are available anymore.

If this is indeed the issue, removing that one sidebar would solve it. Unfortunately though, at the moment the only possible way to do that seems to be to remove the entry directly from the database. I do not know how or if that could affect anything else though. So make sure to make a proper backup if you’d decide to do so.

I’m sending this all through to our development team so they can check upon this bug and fix it.

Kevin

Thanks Kevin. Any chance you know how I would do that (remove the entry from the database)? I’ve logged onto my host’s control panel and identified the database… but from there I don’t know how to identify the specific entry. I have made a backup, but I’m still wary of poking around in there.

Thanks!

Kevin, I’ve managed to get into my database and I’ve looked through every part of it, I think — and I cannot find where I would change or delete this entry. I called my web host not once but twice, and both tech support reps told me I’d have to get that info (where to find it) from the makers of the theme. So I come back to you, with time running out, wondering how do I quickly fix this problem please?

Resolution: my web host luckily does daily, weekly and monthly backups of all my sites so they helped me roll it back and undo all of the changes made today. I lost about 8 hours of work but at least I can get started again. Hopefully this bug gets fixed in the next update to MikMag if one is coming.

Well.

IT HAPPENED AGAIN.

I had successfully had my site restored to a previous safety, which allowed me to start over and do all of today’s work again (but at least I could work again, so I was happy)… I created new sidebars, this time making sure they had no apostrophes — I just used single words and no special characters. Everything seemed good. I started assigning widgets to the new sidebars and all seemed to be fine. I redid about three hours work.

Then I switched from a 4-column footer layout to a 3-column footer layout on one page to see how that looked. BOOM, all my newly created sidebars are in the inactive section.

How can a theme have so many problems? Is there an update coming? Unfortunately because of this, I will not be able to present this site on Monday as scheduled, and I fear I’ll have to start with a whole other theme that won’t break when I do anything. Seriously let down… I will check whether a refund is available.

I have the same problem. I have been researching this issue for a few days now and it seems that it has something to do with some entry missing in the database. I am very new to wordpress so I have no clue how to enter the database and even if I did, I wouldn’t know what to do, once I’m there. I would appreciate any help with resoling this problem.

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