Widgets Admin Can’t Drag and Drop

Ugh.

a) Redownload WordPress 2.1. Extract the wp-includes/js/scriptaculous/* files from there and put them where they belong (that same directory). Moving them around will *break the blog*, so don’t do that.

b) Download the latest widgets code (1.2.1a or something like that). Put it in wp-content/plugins/widgets/widgets.php.

c) Download this file and put it in wp-includes/js/scriptaculous/wp-scriptaculous.js . It was a missing file in the original 2.1 release. Lack of it might cause issues.

d) If you have *any* scriptaculous stuff in the widgets directory, delete it.

e) While looking at the widgets page, hit CTRL-F5 to refresh your browser. Might also want to clear the browser cache beforehand.

That will fix it, if you do all of those steps. But moving things around randomly won’t help at all. So stop doing that.

Thanks for the reply Otto. I don’t normally resort to hacking, but I’d already tried everything you just listed…with the exception of downloading the wp-scriptaculous.js file.

Just for completeness, I did everything you mentioned, in order. Since it’s not a live site, I redid the whole WP install, just to make sure and disabled all other plugins to rule-out that possibility.

Cleared the cache and did the ctrl-f5 as mentioned…I’m back to the beginning where the mouse cursor changes on a mouse-over, but click and drag doesn’t function.

Error console is giving me: ‘uncaught exception: script.aculo.us requires the Prototype JavaScript framework >= 1.5.0’. Now, this is what I was seeing before. When I inspect the protoype.js file, it says that it’s: “Version: ‘1.5.0_rc0′”.

All of the files are in the scriptaculous directory, there are no .js files in the widgets directory. All .js files are -rwxr-xr-x, so I don’t think it’s a permissions issue.

I know it’s not the ‘right’ way to solve whatever the underlying problem may be, but on a hunch, I moved the protoype.js up to the wp-includes/js directory and…..presto it works just fine now. I think I was on the right hack-track before but I was missing the wp-scriptaculous.js file or I just needed to reinstall everything from scratch. Either way, something’s definetly not right with WP2.1 + Widgets, out of the box – though I suppose that it could be something quirky about my install, though I don’t readily see what that could be…

prototype.js is indeed supposed to be in the wp-includes/js directory. Another copy of the same file is also in the scriptaculous directory. I think you may have just gotten your files misplaced and such. Take a look at the 2.1 zip file and see where they’re all supposed to go.

You’re right. I re-downloaded WP2.1 and it had it in the right spot. Something was funky with my original tar file and it was missing a bunch of files.

Funny enough though, it turns out that there was another problem with one of my plug-ins: namely the king framework. They include a lite version of prototype.js in their plugin that seemed to stomp on the default one and it didn’t have all of the necessary functions so I had to change one of the files in that plugin to include the default version of the file instead of the one included with the plugin or I saw the same behavior.

I think I have everything playing nice now.

I just wanted to add for future reference that I had this same problem, and in my case, it was also a King Framework plugin that turned out to be the culprit.

I have King Framework working successfully on some other blogs, but for some reason it was making this one throw fits. Once I narrowed it down to the King Framework widget, I just replaced it with another plugin that would accomplish the same goal and didn’t debug any further.