Local save in customizer doesn’t stick

Have you looked at the webserver error logs ?

Have you enabled debugging of the localhosted WordPress website, details here:
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Debugging_in_WordPress

Are you able to make other changes to the website ? Like edit a page or change a menu ?

No I didn’t , but will have a look at that and enable it.

What I did do however, is I uploaded the site to another domain I have ( but haven’t used yet) just to check if the changes made in the back end were committed to the files….and it did.

So to make things clear:
When I update anything through the “Customize” menu set in the back end, it shows in the preview, but doesn’t get committed to the localhost front end.
However when I back up these exact same files and upload them again ( in this case to another domain), the changes I have made do show….
So I am at a loss atm what this could be, as I initially thought it was a theme specific issue, but then I saw it was with other themes too…then I uploaded the site to another live domain and the changes were being committed….so if my logic is correct it has to be something to do with WAMP right?

So another “fun” addition:

I exported the live site ( where changes did stick to the front end, back onto the local site without changing anything) ..so just an import/export roundtrip and none of the changes stick on the local site.

So I thought why not change something on the live site and reimport … and that didn’t work either.
To be clear I completely emptied out the WAMP directory, dropped the SQL database and did everything from scratch so I reimported the new database and installed the site fresh… so it is very strange to me that it remembers things all the way back from the initial export from the live site, it does commit changes seemingly in teh back end, but not in the local site’s front end.

Also it does appear to be editable by other means, so I can re arrange menu’s delete and add items.
The only other thing I find strange is that when I use the themes pagebuilder I can change background images and replace them with images that were uploaded prior to export.
But for some strange reason new images are a problem, when I try to upload them via the media library they often become these broken image links.
When I manually put them in the wp-content/uploads directory they show up in teh pagebuilder backend, but when I save and exit ..the previous setting re appears

I think I have found something… though it doesn’t get my any further.
For some reason everytime I load the local website, it creates a WP-Content folder on my root drive C:/
I delete it, but at every reload/refresh of the webpage it comes back up again.

The fun part is that when I copy and past the folder and its contents into the one on the C drive, changes do get committed

Will look further to see what is going wrong here…I disabled real time scanning/skype/firewall and it still keeps creating this folder on the C drive… and I have admin rights for all users on the entire C drive

And I installed it using duplicator pro, manually aswell as using the default path duplicator has put in as I thought it had something to do with WP not having a path, but that didn’t work either..
Any ideas are of course appreciated..

I have done the virtualhost thing WAMP reccommends,but when I click on that one, it also creates a wp-content folder on teh root drive

I am thinking that your browser is using a cached view of your website. Have you tried a different browser ? firefox / chrome / safari / InternetExplorer
Have you tried doing a “Shift+refresh” in your browser ?

So when you view your website it creates a directory in your C: root drive. Where is your webserver configured to get the website folders from ?

Hi Ross,

Thanks (again) for your response… I have moved my installation to an external drive as I thought Windows had some hidden setting blocking WAMP from writing to the C drive…but alas…
Even when on the F Drive it creates a wp-content folder on the root of the drive.
Whenever I make a change, I have to copy .css files ( check adjustment dates)from F:\wp-content to where it should be: F:\wamp64\www\mysite\wp-content and then it shows up and on top of that I have to do a shift refresh sometimes as you suggested.

When I go inside wamp and click on “www directory”, it goes straight to [F:\wamp64\www] and I have set up a virtual host before performing a local installation of the website.
And that gave this directory in the vhost.conf file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName MYNAME
DocumentRoot “f:/wamp64/www/mywebsite”
<Directory “f:/wamp64/www/mywebsite/”>
Options +Indexes +Includes +FollowSymLinks +MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Require local
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

There also is a default one on top of the one I created ( but am unsure if deleting this really helps or hinders):
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName localhost
ServerAlias localhost
DocumentRoot “${INSTALL_DIR}/www”
<Directory “${INSTALL_DIR}/www/”>
Options +Indexes +Includes +FollowSymLinks +MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Require local
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

I have narrowed it down to the plugin and am in contact with them, so hopefully they can explain this behaviour.

For some reason I have to copy the .css files and sometimes images on the root of the drive over to the one in the web directory and then the changes commit, with images I have to do a little dance where I have to copy them over to the right directory first, before I use the media browser.

Again I have done multiple variations of installations and this stays the same regardless of how and where I install