Appearance Widget screen not responsive

Hi @mikepve,

Sorry to hear about this issue.

1. Please triple check that this is the plugin you use. I know there are a lot of similarly named plugins. This one is “Feature a Page Widget.”
2. On Appearance > Widgets, open your browser’s “console.” Here are instructions for doing that for lots of browsers.
3. You should see some red error text in that console. Copy and paste that into a new post on this thread.

Also, I would recommend you see if you can use the Customizer Widgets interface (Appearance > Customize > Widgets). It’s quite possible that that still works.

Hi @mrwweb

Ya i have confirms this is the plugin in use. I went through the plugins page after reactivating it and follow the details to contact you.
I have opened the console, reloaded the page and tried to do things on the page. Nothing on the page (appearance-> widgets) works, and no red text is showing in the console. This is all i get…

JQMIGRATE: Migrate is installed, version 1.4.1
load-scripts.php?c=0&load[]=jquery-core,jquery-migrate,utils,jquery-ui-core,jquery-ui-widget,jquery…:9

I have also tried as you recommended going via the customize screen, but although the left customize sidebar show, the page to be customize fails to display, unless i turn off the plugin.

Not sure what other information I can give you that would be helpful.

-Mike

Ok, try this: View the page source of Appearance > Widgets. Search in the page for anything that says “Warning”, “Error” (“Fatal Error”), or “Notice” or some other error message. If you find something, I would expect it toward the bottom of the page, though it could be anywhere.

Also, if at all possible try running your site with Feature a Page Widget and a default WordPress theme like Twenty Seventeen. While the Feature a Page Widget plugin may trigger the error, the actual problem could potentially be in the theme.

Well right at the bottom I have found the following…

<b>Fatal error</b>: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in <b>/home1/pveng/public_html/wp-content/plugins/feature-a-page-widget/inc/fpw_helper_functions.php</b> on line <b>115</b><br />

in the mean time I will keep scrolling through the page source and tried to find something more.

Thanks for your help. Its greatly appreciated.

-Mike

Thanks for that error. That would explain what you’re seeing.

A few questions:

• Do you have a lot of Pages and posts on your site (hundreds or more?).
• Do you feature only Pages or do you also feature Posts or other custom post types?

Hello Mark,

Yeah I have alot of pages. Probably in the range of 150+ pages being pulled into other pages via the widget. We are only using the pages aspect of the widget. We have a separate widget for featuring post.

-Mike

Apologies, the code snippet had a bug in it when first published. That has been fixed 30 seconds after posting.

This widget is built in a way so that a site with a lot of pages and posts will encounter memory issues when loading the Appearance > Widgets screen. I’d love to resolve this at some point, but a fix is probably not coming any time soon.

Please try adding this snippet to your site and see if that resolves the problem:

add_filter( 'fpw_post_types', 'wp7256101_fpw_remove_posts' );
function wp7256101_fpw_remove_posts( $post_types ) {
	unset($post_types['post']);
	return $post_types;
}

That would either go in a functions.php file or, better, a custom /mu-plugins/ file.

That snippet removes “Posts” from the list of things you can feature and may solve your problem.

Let me know if that fixes it!

• This reply was modified 7 years, 8 months ago by mrwweb.

@mikepve were you ever able to try this tweak and see if it helped?

Hello Mark,

Sorry about the delay. I was able to try this but unfortunately it did not help. What I have ended up doing is changing over a few of our landing pages to use a page in page widget in order to reduce the number of uses of the feature a page widget. Unfortunately this wont really help because I cant manipulate the widgets page to delete uses that i am no longer using.
This is the site i am working on if it helps…
https://www.pveng.com

All of our sidebars which display “contact us”, “new and update” and “related reading” pages are also created using the Feature a page widget. Which is why I have so many uses of it. Each page basically has its own sidebar created.

Hi @mikepve,

Sorry you haven’t been able to resolve this. My guess as to your problem involves the length of the list of pages in a single widget and not the number of total widgets, so I’m not too surprised to hear that didn’t work (though another data point is always useful).

Getting a fix to this issue is going to be tricky, but I’m trying to think about at least a temporary solution I could get up for you relatively quickly. In that case, I may reply back here asking you to test out a beta version of the new version. Would you be open to that?

Hello @mrwweb,

Yes i would most definitly be will to try out any solution you come up with. Thank you for taking the time to at least find a temporary solution. Many thanks.

-Mike

@mikepve,

Here’s a link to the new beta version: https://downloads.www.ads-software.com/plugin/feature-a-page-widget.2.0.11.zip

It includes one extremely small update that could theoretically fix your problem. However, I doubt it will.

More importantly, if you add this to your functions.php or functionality plugin (better!), I’m 90% sure your problem will be resolved:

add_filter( 'fpw_temp_memory_fix', '__return_true' );

That removes the drop-down page selection list in the widget form (which is a bummer) and replaces it with a text field where you specify the Post ID of what you want to feature.

You can switch between these two modes without any loss of data, so your widgets should continue to work. If I can fix the underlying issue, you’d be able to go back to the normal interface just by removing that extra code.

If that fixes your issue, I’ll post the update for everyone to use.

@mrwweb,

Does this go into the child functions.php file or the themes main functions.php file?

@mikepve If you have a child theme, it should go in that functions file.

@mikepve were you ever able to test this out? I’d love to make sure this is working for you before releasing it to everyone.

Thanks in advance.