can't delete or change widgets of any type

@ cheryl

Do you have the Widget Pack installed? The core Connections plugin does not have any widgets, so there should not be any reason for there to be an effect because there is nothing loading by the core Connections plugin on that page.

Can you give me an admin account to the fresh install so I can see the issue?

@ cheryl

I sure maybe a time difference combined with that this was originally posted after I had finished up for the day.

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you, long weekend b/c of the holiday. I had hoped to have some time away from family activities to answer some email but that didn’t happen.

I did log in to the site and visited the Widgets admin page in Chrome and IE11 and did not experience the spinning wheel. The page loaded quite quickly in spite of the large number of sidebars the theme registers. Which OS and browser are you experienced this on?

@ cheryl

Ok, I took another look and see what you mean…

First, it seems Widget Logic has a fatal error in it. Trying to activate/deactivate plugins and themes end up in the white screen of death as long as it activated.

The widget error… I’m unfortunately going have to say this is a bug within the theme and not Connections. I installed the Query Monitor plugin see I could view PHP error messages. I left it active so you can see too. The theme generates quite a few PHP errors with many relating to the widgets and menus. My guess it is one of these errors which is causing a server 500 error when add/deleting a widget. My best guess without debugging the theme is that the “conflict” is occurring because of one of the menu errors the them is causing. I suspect that because Connections does hook into a few menu related filters. If one or more plugins/themes hook into the same filter within WordPress (a perfectly valid thing) and one of those generated an error when the next plugin’s hook is run and does not receive the data it expects that can cause fatal errors such as the one you are seeing.

Sorry, but you’ll have to contact Shape 5 and ask if they have an update which addresses these errors.

@ cheryl

First, my apologies! I fat fingered a change in code when doing debugging and brought down the site. If you give me FTP access I’ll fix it immediately.

Sorry, but I am going to have to respectfully disagree with Shape 5. There are bugs in their theme causing the issue and I located the specific one causing the issue! What follows is a sampling of some of the bugs in the theme.

File:
/vertex/s5flex_menu/flexmenu.walker.php

Line 16 is this:
function start_lvl(&$output, $depth) {

Should be:
function start_lvl(&$output, $depth = 0, $args = array()) {

Line 25 is this:
function end_lvl(&$output, $depth) {

Should be:
function end_lvl(&$output, $depth = 0, $args = array()) {

Line 45 is this:
function start_el(&$output, $item, $depth, $args) {

Should be:
function start_el(&$output, $item, $depth = 0, $args = array(), $id = 0 ) {

Line 175 is:
function end_el(&$output, $item, $depth) {

Should be:
function end_el(&$output, $item, $depth = 0, $args = array()) {

Line 196 is:
function start_lvl(&$output) {$output = $output;}

Should be:
function start_lvl(&$output, $depth = 0, $args = array()) {$output = $output;}

Line 203 is this:
function end_lvl(&$output) {$output = $output;}

Should be:
function end_lvl(&$output, $depth = 0, $args = array()}

Line 213 is:
function start_el(&$output, $item, $depth, $args) {

Should be:
function start_el(&$output, $item, $depth = 0, $args = array(), $id = 0) {

None of the above is the cause. This is..

In the this file /vertex/includes/classes/standalone_functions.class.php on lines 196–198 is the following:

add_filter('the_content', 'do_shortcode', 11);
add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');
add_filter( 'gettext','do_shortcode');

The last line is a major error and I can not see any valid reason to add such a filter. As soon as that line is removed, everything works fine. The first line does not make any sense to me either as WordPress already filters for and runs the shortcode filter on the post content. Doing this could have unintended consequences for any other plugin which add their own shortcode and expects WordPress to handle the processing of shortcode in the correct order. On the flip side, this could be harmless with the only real negative is the increased overhead on each page load from running the shortcode parser on the post content multiple times.

Now, you might be asking why does that last line only affect Connections… The gettext function is a core WordPress feature (put simply) that allows text in WordPress, themes and plugins to be translated. At least one of the translatable strings in Connections has the [connections] shortcode in it as an instruction for the user. Adding the shortcode filter to the gettext makes WordPress run the shortcode and this is something that WordPress and Connections was not designed to handle to it was causing a fatal failure in ajax requests.

Another very real consequence of this filter is that every string in WordPress, theme and every plugin will be run thru the WordPress shortcode parser which will very likely have negative impacts on page load times.

@ cheryl

Yes, the main site is fine… when you have a chance to get me the FTP login, I’ll fix the subfolder site you were letting me debug on.