custom tabs disappearing

after trying to add the tab again with the same content i find that it just pdate the meta value in postmeta table and nothing changed except one thing:

this is an example:

a:1:{i:0;a:3:{s:5:”title”;s:27:”tab title”;s:2:”id”;s:25:”documents-telechargeables”;s:7:”content”;s:82:”test”;}}

new one
a:1:{i:0;a:3:{s:5:”title”;s:27:”tab title”;s:2:”id”;s:25:”documents-telechargeables”;s:7:”content”;s:142:”test”;}}

s:142 and s:82
what is this? and does it have relation with the problem??
i lost a big work in tabs
i hope that you fix this problem

Hi @ardv,

I understand that you are having an issue here, but please do not post the same thing in several different threads. That’s not an appropriate use of the free support forums and makes it more difficult for our team to provide support.

The content you linked is called serialized data. It’s the format PHP uses to store objects and arrays in the database. You should never ever manually edit that data. Plugins and other functionality depend on that information to be unserialized properly. If you make an edit, and the data cannot be unserialized properly, anything depending on that data will not work (including our plugin).

If you need to change serialized data for some reason, it is strongly recommended that you write a PHP script to manage that change. WordPress has built-in functionality to unserialize and serialize data appropriately when reading and writing to the database when using the appropriate meta-related functions.

The only recommendation I can make is to either delete whatever postmeta fields you have updated (which may allow the unedited tabs to load correctly), or restore a backup from before you started manually editing fields.

Jon