Sallie Goetsch

I’ve just run into this problem myself–a student of mine tried the plugin on the Twenty Eleven theme. I’m not sure why the extra breaks don’t occur on your demo site. Is there an ETA for the new version?

Theme updates always overwrite any changes you make to theme files. That’s the way updates work.

They should not overwrite changes you make in your theme options, but if there is a way to back up theme options, it doesn’t hurt to do that. (Take a screenshot, if nothing else.)

Depending on how much customization you’ve been doing, you have a couple of different ways to avoid having to repeat your changes every time there is a theme update.

First, as a couple of others have mentioned, is to make a child theme. This is what you will need to do if you have made any changes to the functions.php file or to any page templates. Child themes were invented specifically to avoid the overwrite problem. (Well, and to make it easy to build new themes that were a lot like old ones.)

The second is to use a Custom CSS plugin. If all you are changing is the stylesheet, then you can use something like the Custom CSS feature in Jetpack to make the changes, without having to create a whole child theme. (But save your own copy of that CSS in a text file somewhere, just to be safe.) If you are not using other features from Jetpack, find a different plugin for custom CSS, or just write an additional stylesheet and then summon it in the header. (You will need to replace that link and possibly re-upload the stylesheet after upgrades.)

I can’t tell you how glad I am to know there will continue to be more versions of the plugin. I was a little concerned when I saw it hadn’t been updated since May, even though there’d been new releases of both WP and Genesis. I use it so much that I’d hate to see it disappear. (So maybe I should drop something in the donation jar, ya think?)

I was adding a new post, put the tags on it, noticed that the tag was singular instead of plural. For consistency with the other tags, I thought it should be plural. So after I saved the post, I went over to the tags and edited the tag to make the tag name, and tag slug, plural. It seemed to take a long time to save that change. The tag in question had been “Wedding Cake” (changed to “Wedding Cakes”), slug “wedding-cake” (changed to “wedding-cakes”).

That tag, of course, was the particular taxonomy selected for the GFWA widget under the heading “Wedding Cakes.”

Now, it would make sense to me if that particular widget broke when I changed the tag name, and that would have given me a clue, given I knew I’d just changed the tag name, to go re-set the widget. What I don’t understand is why EVERYTHING ELSE then also broke.

Is that enough info for you to repro the problem?

Oh, BTW, the debug bar pointed some deprecated function calls: attribute_escape and get_theme_data. Might be time to fix them if you’re going to need to tune something up anyway. (I had actually fixed them myself, but then thought maybe I should re-load the original version of the plugin to see whether that would help.)

Ha! Yes, that must have been the problem. The question is–was that my problem, or yours? Will the widget always break if someone edits the name/slug of something used for the widget? I can see how it might, and how it might not be possible to prevent.

I know how, but this is a free site hosted by ZippyKid, so I don’t have direct access to wp-config.php. I have to ask them to turn wp_debug on. So it will take a while. But what you said made me think. I’d just created a post under wedding cakes, and also edited the tag for same. What if I attempt 1) removing that widget and creating a new one and 2) if that doesn’t work, deleting the post (which only has a featured image) and re-creating that?

It strikes me that changing the name–and slug–of the tag is the thing most likely to have messed up the widget.

I can go reactivate it.

Thanks, Error. That WAS what I thought, but I wanted some official confirmation. We’re actually planning to get rid of that part of the code soon.

Okay, I checked with the client. The old pages don’t exist on the other sites, so your solution will work. And it DOES work. You, @ipstenu, are a genius. I was going to make a donation for the brilliant Multi-site e-book you and @andrea_r wrote anyway, but will run over and do it now.

I took over this project two years in, and there are 6 sites, so I’ll have to go see whether those pages exist on the other sites. (Oh, someone PLEASE invent a way for the network admin to log into all the dashboards at once. PLEASE.)

Ah. Small snag. Five of the six sites have /media-info/ pages. I don’t know whether they also had older pages that need redirecting, though. The client has not mentioned any. (As the client is not known for rigorous testing, this means nothing.)

So maybe we DO need a regex?

“Checks whether user is logged in” does not imply “Displays a blank space when user is logged in.” I would have expected something like what Subscribe2 does, where it shows you a “Manage your subscription” link instead of a sign-up box.

I found that and fixed it on my own site (the option shortname is _header_top_paddig, carrying over the typo from _header_left_paddig), but this actually shoves the whole masthead area down and makes the header taller. You need to apply the padding just to the .header h1.