After 2.0.2 update the sidebars display incorrectly

As elysblog has mentioned; the condition groups do not retain the searched for categories or tags. Only those listed in the ‘Most Viewed’ and ‘View All’ are still saved after pressing the update button. Also as previously mentioned, the pagination for ‘View All’ is not working and repeats the entries.

Although I can get the correct sidebar to appear and display the recent posts of that category(as long as the category is listed for selection) the sidebar does not remain for other posts of the same category but displays every single sidebar set for all my other categories.

It was a great plugin before the update but I have wasted most of the day trying in vain to reset the conditions, and reading through the threads many others are having similar difficulties; I hope another update is imminent!

Many thanks!

Rich

I will try to answer all your posts, but please provide me with the exact settings of your sidebars, so that I can try to reproduce the problems you are experiencing.

I can confirm that pagination for taxonomies in the sidebar editor does not work properly. Do any of you have problems with pagination for post types (pages, posts etc)?

To the ones having trouble adding items found via search, can you open a JavaScript console in your browser (for Chrome and Firefox: CTRL SHIFT J, for Internet Explorer 11: F12) and refresh the sidebar editor page. If there are any JS errors, they will be shown in this console.
Does it show anything when adding the item?

Also note that an empty condition group will cause your sidebar to be displayed with all content. This is intentional as an empty group simply means: display sidebar under all conditions.

Thanks

For my home page I have:
Condition 1
Static Pages
Front Page
Search Results
404 page

Condition 2
Pages (relevant page selected)
Category (Unable to select category as not in list and will not save via search.)

The rest of my site uses the following:

Condition 1
All Posts

Condition 2
category (if saved successfully)

The side bars that are displaying correctly contain a ‘latest posts’ widget for each related category although when a post is clicked the sidebar reverts to display all as if its an empty condition.

Hope this helps

Regards

Rich

@richgb

For the home page sidebar, your Condition 2 is: Display sidebar together with pages containing a category.
Unless you have added category support for pages, they do not support it, and thus this condition can never be satisfied. Try splitting that group into two.

For the other sidebar, your conditions are:
Display sidebar with all posts OR posts by a given category.
This will always be true for any post.

@all

I will push out a fix for the search and pagination bugs that hopefully resolves your problems.

Thanks again for the help

I’m still struggling with this; no matter what I try I can’t get the conditions to work properly. The sidebar for the subsequent posts of a given category are still displaying the empty condition.

I’ve tried all sorts of condition combinations and reread the faq so maybe I’m just not understanding the basic principals?

Thanks

Rich

Thanks Johachim,

I had seen this, trying various solutions I solved by creating a group for each type and I wanted to tell that in this case the italian translation is not good:

“Clicca per modificare un gruppo o crearne uno nuovo. Seleziona il contenuto a sinistra per aggiungerlo. In ogni gruppo, è possibile combinare diversi tipi di contenuti associati.”

better is:
“Clicca per modificare un gruppo o crearne uno nuovo. Seleziona il contenuto a sinistra per aggiungerlo. In ogni gruppo, è possibile aggiungere più elementi purché siano associati (tag, categorie, articoli, ecc.) per assegnare elementi non associati alla stessa sidebar devi inserirli in gruppi diversi”

and more in the left boxes buttons:
“aggiungi gruppo”

better is:
“aggiungi gli elementi selezionati al gruppo”

Only remains the problem that items added via the search option are not maintained when you save or update the sidebar, but take a little rest! ((-:

Ciao, Ely

I found that the fix for me was that somehow under each Condition Field, there was another empty Condition Field. I deleted all of the empty Condition Fields, saved the pages and all the duplicates across all the pages went away.

Love the plugin, now… mmm not so much..
I use it on client sites where the content requires more complicated sidebar constructions.. I have spent the last 4 hours trying to get the websites back to normal.

I find that the term “condition group” is not what it implies, only when I make a ‘condition group” for each condition the correct sidebar shows.
When ever I combine rules, it just does not work…
So I need to make “condition group” for category x, make “condition group” for cat y and again “condition group” for category z, instead of just 1 “condition group” for x,y and z together…

Maybe such a major update should not be released without some large(r) scale beta-testing. Especially with more people using auto update and managed update services… where it can take a while before you realize that a plugin stopped working.

Goodluck getting things back to normal… sofar the plugin has not improved with the last update..

Hi,

I believe to have understand!!! ((-:

The target of the developers is that you can added in a group for example “all the articles” (regardless of the topic) and again to make an example the tag “travels” and as for magic, all the articles tagged “travels” (only those, because satisfy the condition “travels”) display the sidebars that contain links to travels agencies, hotels, and contain dream place’s images, etc. (you must do yourself the widgets!) ((-:

is this correct?

Well, now I behave good ((-:

Ciao di nuovo, Ely

@richgb

What exactly do you mean by “The sidebar for the subsequent posts of a given category are still displaying the empty condition”? That you still cannot add some items to get group?

@elysblog

Thanks for the heads up. If you think that the translation it misleading, you can either contribute with an updated translation file or contact the person that has contributed so far. You can find the translation contributors here: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/content-aware-sidebars/

Have you updated to version 2.0.3? If so, do you still have trouble adding items to a group?

Your description of the condition groups is absolutely right.

@jaypeg

Great to hear that you got it sorted. Maybe there was a hiccup as the data in the database got upgraded, leading to empty groups.

@webtaurus

It is unfortunate that you have had problems after the update. I do acknowledge that the transition has lead to some minor bugs and that these could have been avoided with more tests. However, the plugin has been in beta for a month, and it has been tested on installations of all supported WordPress versions, even the current state of version 3.9.

You say that you have clients that require more complicated sidebar constructions, and this is exactly why I introduced condition groups. Maybe it should be made clearer how such a group acts:
You can put associated content in a group, i.e. lots of specific categories. If you also put “All posts” in the same group, you assure that the sidebar will NOT be displayed with a custom post type having the same categories – only posts.
Distinct content, i.e. content that is never to be seen on the same page, should be put in different groups.

It is on the roadmap to make it so that a group is aware of what content it contains and will tell you whether or not its conditions can be satisifed.

Hi Joachim, thanks for the answer… I do appreciate the work you do on the plugin.
For me the plugin was working fine before the update. And because the plugin has been stable I updated it through WPRemote.
Then after a few days a customer mails that there are problems with the plugin… That website has several CPT’s and 13 sidebars. On such a website it is impossible to recreate the state of the rules and conditions if for some reason the plugin stops working or makes a major change that makes it necessary to recreate them.
For that specific website (and a few others) I had to revert to a database from just before the update and version 1.3.5

These changes mean that I will have to study the changelog for every update, and test on a staging website which is not a desirable system really. (In general WordPress tries to remain backwards compatible and is working on auto-updates as you surely know)

What is the best way to get notified of major changes to your plugin? Is there a mailing list that I can follow?
How do you warn users that a certain update changes the way the configuration is stored in the database?

Kind Regards, Henk

Hi, Joachim

Yes! 2.0.3 version solved
everything work fantastic now, devoting a bit of time to understand the mechanisms it turns out that the plugin is very very powerful and offers endless possibilities, according to me the best sidebars manager for Wp available in the web.
As I said I use the blog to share fun with friends, but I well understand how important is get answers and quick fixes for those who work (do not forget that the plugin is free) and in this you have been exceptional (-:

Thank You very much Joachim

Un saluto e un ringraziamento a tutti, Ely (-:

Hi Joachim

I have finally got everything running as it should! My problem was understanding the basic principals of the conditions applied to posts and pages and how the categories etc relate. My site carries 49 individual sidebars so it was quite a mess to sort out.

Thanks for your support and also for the update which helped.

Regards

Rich

In case you have defined sidebars that are not used at all they are automatically added on all pages along with the sidebars that you want to have with the individual pages. The condition groups are empty for these sidebars and i think that the plugin does not like that.

@webtaurus

I do understand your concern and points, and I choose the version numbers (roughly) like this: <major>.<minor>.<fixes>. This does not mean that a major version will become incompatible, though.
In the readme, there is a section called “Upgrade Notice” where you can read if you should be cautious or not. I do not know why WordPress does not display these messages in the administration.
Currently there is no mailing list, but you are free to contact me any time.

@elysblog @richgb

It is great that you got it sorted out, and I understand that it can take time to get used to these new groups.

@xtiaan_moons

This is correct, and even though it might seem illogical at first, an empty group means that it has no concrete conditions and that it therefore will be displayed under no concrete conditions, i.e. all conditions.

@all

This thread is resolved. If you still experience problems, please open a new thread.