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Advertising Manager plugin broke my sidebar (6 posts)

  1. pcskibum
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    Has anyone else tried using the new Advertising Manager plugin with Wordpress-mu? http://bit.ly/1QdOXP

    I installed Advertising Manager 3.3.10 a couple of days ago. Looks like it's going to be a really great plugin, but right now it's given me a serious problem.

    My Appearance/Widgets page reports "You are using 5 widgets in the Sidebar1 sidebar." but there are only 4 widgets listed on the right side of the page. I have looked in the database to find where information about active plugins, and sidebar widgets is located, but I can't find anything. Can someone tell me where I should be looking so I can clean up the bad data?

    Here's how the problem was created.

    1) After installing Advertising Manager I created my first ad (using Commission Junction smartzones). That was very easy and there were no obvious problems/errors. I set up the options and gave the ad a name.

    2) Then I went into Appearance/Widgets assuming I would find a new widget to place the ad in my sidebar. Sure enough, there was the ad I had created, listed by name among the widgets. I clicked "Add" and the ad appeared under my other active sidebar widgets. I dragged it to the top and pressed Save. That's when the first problem appeared. As soon as I hit Save all of the active widgets disappeared (meaning, they were no longer shown on the right side of the page), but the message above still said 5 active widgets in the sidebar.

    3) After taking a deep breath I opened a different browser and took a look at my home page. Not only was the whole sidebar missing, but the theme was now seriously broken. Obviously, some tables or css elements had been broken by the ad.

    4) The first thing I thought to do was disable Advertising Manager. When I did that the 4 original widgets reappeared on the actual site and the admin page. But the message still insisted that 5 widgets were installed, even though I could only see 4.

    So my site looks OK now, but there is a zombie widget stuck in the database somewhere.

  2. pcskibum
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    After looking in the database more while making changes to the blog I found my problem. I'll include this here in case someone else has a similar problem. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME KIDS. Editing this manually is probably a good way to kill your blog.

    I have a table called wp_1_options which contains a field called sidebar_widgets. The data in that field is coded, but I found that each widget has a group of data like this:

    i:1;s:14:"text-378300242";

    The widget name, in this case "text" makes the groups pretty easy to identify.

    So I deleted the group of data referring to the Advertising Manager widget, which I had previously disabled.

    Also, look for the name of the sidebar with the problem. After the name is the number of widgets. After deleting one manually you have to change that number. In my case it looked like this:

    "sidebar-1";a:5:

    I changed the 5 to a 4.

    After making those two changes to the database my blog seems to be working perfectly again.

    Do not try this yourself - I am only providing this information for educational purposes.

    I still hope to find the original problem with the Advertising Manager plugin because it looked like a very handy tool.

  3. Ovidiu
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    there is a widget called reset widgets, which might also help and be safer: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widgets-reset/

  4. switzer
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    pcskibum:

    Thanks for posting the bug on code.openx.org - I would never have checked on this forum. I have tested advertising manager on MU and it worked for me - in a simple test scenario.

    I would love to get to the bottom of the issues that you were having - I designed advertising manager to work with MU (althougth I don't use MU myself in the wild...)

    Can you please let me know:
    1. Version of WP MU
    2. php error log details

    and I can try to help you out. My skype is 'switzer' if this is easier..

    Cheers,
    Scott

  5. switzer
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    BTW - I tested again in MU v2.7.1 and it works just fine. Please contact me so that we can get this sorted. Many thanks!

  6. switzer
    Member
    Posted 14 years ago #

    Note that there was a related fix made to the latest version of Advertising Manager which may be related to the issue above. Please try again and let me know the results!

    Cheers,
    Scott

About this Topic

  • Started 15 years ago by pcskibum
  • Latest reply from switzer