Sidebar and Widgets Issues

[bretemiller]

I have many sidebar menus and they seem to have a conflict that is causing several issues. I have placed ubermenu in the sidebar. On the widget page, the ubermenu selection of the menu is incorrect, I can change the menu, however, is does not hold with that menu as it switches back to another menu. When creating a sidebar - menu it will not appear in the widgets page or it will disappear after it is there for a short while.

Please advise how to correct this issue. Thanks.

[ruenel]

Hello Bret,

Thanks for writing in! When creating a sidebar in Appearance > Sidebars, you will need to assign this sidebar in which page you want it to display. After that, you need to go to Appearance > Widgets and insert widgets to your newly created sidebar. This is also where you can insert the UberMenu navigation widget into one of your sidebars.

If nothing is working, provide us access to your site so that we can check your settings. Please create a secure note with the following info:
– Link to your site
– WordPress Admin username / password
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To know how to create a secure note, please check this out: https://theme.co/apex/forum/t/how-to-get-support/288

Regards.

[christian]

Hey Bret,

I moved an inactive UberMenu widget to one of your sidebars and it doesn’t change. Also, it is impossible for the widgets to just disappear without other stuff working on your database. Would you mind providing a detailed or step by step instruction as to how we could replicate the issue?

Thanks.

[bretemiller]

Hi Christian,

Here is how the issue started. I had a sidebar for every menu in my menus expect the footer and main. So it was about 20 some sidebars. You will see that I have a large site with a lot of taxmonies which means it takes a long time to load all the sidebars. So after I had all my sidebars set, I made a simple change by adding a page and not wanting to wait on the load time of all the sidebars, I changed to a different page (it seems to have been a bad mistake). Since that decision I have been unable to add all the sidebars that became inactive widgets. I have tried to add some sidebars three or four times.

Here is my process, first I create a sidebar and allow the sidebar to load up and then I check to see if the sidebar is at the bottom of the sidebars. Next I go to widgets and add ubermenu to the widget. Next I go to Sidebars and select the pages for the menu. Lastly I save the sidebar and then I check in widgets and sidebar for the create sidebar.

Let me know what could be my issue(s). Thanks.

[christian]

Hey Bret,

Thanks for the info. I have replicated the issue on your site. This is because of the Widget Area disappearing or being deleted so the widgets inside it go to the Inactive Widgets.

When updating Sidebars such as assigning pages, you will really need to wait for the page to finish loading. I understand it’s not feasible as the Sidebars page will load extremely slow due to the number of sidebars available.

If you have lots of sidebars to create, I’d recommend that you create them programmatically or in WordPress terms, register a sidebar. You can learn how to register sidebars here: https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/register_sidebar/

After registering and putting widgets to a sidebar/widget area, you can assign them programmatically also. Below is a snippet to assign a sidebar to a page. Notice the is_page( 42 ) within the if statement. That’s a WordPress Conditional. 42 is the page’s ID. The instruction to locate the page or post ID can be read here: https://theme.co/docs/how-to-locate-post-ids. ups-sidebar-page is your Sidebar’s slug you created in the sidebar registration step.

function single_post_sidebar( $sidebar ){ 
       if ( is_page( 42 ) )  {      
           return 'ups-sidebar-page';        
       }    
  return $sidebar;
}

add_filter( 'ups_sidebar', 'single_post_sidebar');

If that’s too technical or complicated, I’d recommend hiring a developer to implement that for you. There is nothing we can do about this regretfully. The current setup depends on the server and PC limitations. The sidebar creation process in our themes might be improved in the future but there’s no plans for it as of now.

Hope that helps and thank you for understanding.