Theme Switching and Widgets

  • This seems to be the pink elephant in the room. I don’t see any discussions anywhere about it.

    You set widgets for the active theme. And when you change from one theme to another theme, most of the time all of the widgets are moved to the INACTIVE WIDGETS area. Meaning that only the active theme can have widgets assigned.

    Is there a way that I can allow my site visitors to use a Theme Switcher to choose what theme they want, and allow me to configure widgets on all themes>

    It seems like it is almost useless to allow theme switching if only one theme can be configured at a time. Am I missing something>

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • If your themes are all children of a single parent theme, you won’t get this widget problem.

    @esmi – NOT correct when I switch from between child themes in the thematic framework or to the parent theme all my widgets get thrown into the Inactive widgets area except those that can only have a single invocation – these get thrown back in the Available widgets area.

    Does anyone know of, or is developing a plugin to manage your widgets properly so you can easily restore them.

    Having exactly the same problem. As soon as the theme is ‘switched’ all the widgets are gone. Which kind of makes the whole idea of switching redundant.

    A solution to this would be be fantastic.

    @am1971
    This may not be ideal but will at least allow you to get back to the original widgets layout, if you switch back to the original theme

    https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/widget-saver/

    The behaviour is a “supposed improvement in WP” so that if the new theme supports fewer widgetized areas then no widgets become inaccessible.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • The topic ‘Theme Switching and Widgets’ is closed to new replies.

Tags