wordpress widgets will not save

Question

I followed this tutorial here to get a "base" theme set up:

http://themeshaper.com/2009/06/22/wordpress-themes-templates-tutorial/

Everything has been working great, but now on the last part, styling the "news feed" page I want the sidebar to show up. Everything in the theme, for what I can understand is set up correctly. There are two widget areas defined in the functions.php "primary" and "secondary", the unmodified functions.php and sidebar.php can be viewed here:

http://code.google.com/p/your-wordpress-theme/source/browse/trunk/functions.php and http://code.google.com/p/your-wordpress-theme/source/browse/trunk/sidebar.php

So this is what happens, I go into the appearance -> widgets manager in the admin. The primary and secondary widget area show up on the right.

I drag the categories and recent posts widgets to the primary (or secondary it doesnt matter). I click save on each widget for good measure and then if I browse away and come back the widgets are gone. Nothing is saved.

I'm not using any plugins, I have no 3rd party or custom widgets. These are just the default vanilla wordpress widgets.

I have debugging enabled in the config file but I get no output of any error when I save the widget config. I've even checked the page source after updating the widget and there is no hidden errors at the bottom as some have suggested.

If someone cannot tell me how to fix this, is there anyone that can at least tell me how to debug this, or get some sort of error message from this thing?

Answer 1

Try this

Go to your wp-admin --> and appearance --> widgets

then on the right top you will see a screen options button (a popdown menu) from there Enable accessibility mode and try your widgets

Answer 2

Some suggestions:

• -install debug bar http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/debug-bar/
• enable WP_DEBUG in wp-config
• try to clear cache / use different browser or computer

Answer 3

I was having this issue and thought I would add my findings and update this post. I am currently running version 4.9.8. I learned that you can not use Camel case as the id.

This line does not work.

register_nav_menu( 'newThemeArea', __( 'New Widget Area', 'theme' )

This line does work

register_nav_menu( 'newthemearea' , __( 'New Widget Area', 'theme' )

Answer 4

In my case, my widget had input fields with type="number", and the min attributes had fractions of numbers -- once I've rounded them up and showed them as ints, it worked.

Answer 5

Set id of widget like

'id' => 'high-light-header',

instead of

'id' => 'highLightHeader',