You know how it goes… you think to yourself, “Self! How about trying out a new theme on this here blog o’ mine?!” So you perform the old theme switcheroo, only to notice something a tad disturbing: your sidebar widgets have disappeared.

“Eek!” you think, followed swiftly by, “Well, I’ll just switch back to my original theme and all will be right with the world again! This new theme isn’t actually right for me anyway and I prefer my original design!”

So, the reverse switcheroo happens in double quick time. But: still no sidebar widgets!

It’s like the widget equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle… when you change WordPress themes, your precious widgets seemingly disappear. And changing back to your original theme doesn’t always bring the widgets back from the ether.

The reason why this happens is that each theme uses unique IDs for its sidebars, and widgets are ‘attached’ to specific sidebars. When you change themes, the new theme therefore doesn’t recognise the widgets in the old sidebar because the old sidebar’s ID doesn’t exist in the new theme.

The widgets aren’t really lost – often they’re found lurking in the inactive widgets area and need to be dragged back into the sidebar. Easy enough if you only have a couple of widgets, but reconstructing an elaborate sidebar can be a pain. Sometimes, too, things go wrong in the whole process, and widgets end up floating free or otherwise stuck and inaccessible.

It can be a frustrating experience, to say the least.

Enter the Widget Saver plugin!

The Widget Saver plugin, developed by Zorgbargle specially for Phenomenoodle, is a godsend when switching back and forth between themes by allowing you to save your widgets for your current theme before changing to a new theme. In the event that you then return to your original theme only to find your widgets still missing, you can use the restore function to return your initial theme sidebar to its original state. In worst case scenarios where widgets become stuck, you can use the plugin’s reset function to remove all widgets and return to factory defaults.

Because of the little issue of different sidebar IDs in different themes, the Widget Saver plugin won’t unfortunately allow you to magically transport your sidebar widgets from one theme to another. But it will make life much more pleasant for those times when you want to try out new themes on your blog by keeping your original widget settings in a safe place for you until you return.

You can read more about the Widget Saver plugin and download it via our Free Resources page.

Have your image, video, audio, and other media buttons stopped working? Are you clicking on them, but nothing’s happening? Is your visual editor showing html tags rather than a WYSIWYG interface?

Aha! You, my friend, are probably experiencing a case of too-many-page-revisions-itis.

How can you tell if this is indeed the cause of your non-responsive buttons and suddenly non-visual visual editor? Scroll down your WordPress editing screen: Does it end abruptly after the Page Revisions box heading, like this…

… when it should be looking more like this…

That’s a sure sign that you have too many page revisions in your database, which has thrown its metaphorical hands up in the air at your penchant for constant change and gone to sulk in the corner, leaving your editing page only partly loaded and partly working.

The solution

The solution is a two part one: First, you need to clear all your old page revisions out of your database, and secondly, you need to take steps to manage your page revisions to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Let’s look at each part in turn.

Part 1: Remove old page revisions from the database

Firstly, as is good practice when making any significant changes to your site, backup your database.

Then, do the following yourself or grab a geek and ask them to do the following:

Open phpMyAdmin, select your database and run the following command:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

This will delete all post revisions in your database. You can also tailor the command to only delete post revisions for specific pages if you prefer.

Part 2: Manage your page revisions

Even if you haven’t experienced the panic and confusion that can set in when your WordPress editing screen stops working as it should, I’d recommend doing one of the following to manage your page revisions before they do become a problem. Prevention, as the ubiquitous “they” say, is always better than cure, after all.

Option 1:
Add the following line to your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',10);

Replace 10 with the number of revisions that you want the database to store for each page.

Option 2:
Install the Revision Control plugin to manage the number of page revisions for your site as a whole or on a page-by-page basis.