For those who still have some oooold sites still running NM3, good time to move to NM5.
Various recent WP updates, codebase, latest PHP7x, etc. caused footer widgets to disappear or load wrong items. Going to appearance, widgets, the footer elements (e.g., 3 columns blank) would get reset and might even be empty, even though footers showing. Some sites all three columns just gone.
In our case, seems like the widgets were old text boxes, with HTML, and not modern HTML boxes.
(before doing anything, copy text on visible site for each box, if something like site description; copy text out of any widgets actually working)
THEN:
Simple fix ::
go to theme panel > footer > and change to ‘style 6’ (in our case) vs ‘style 2’
go back to widgets, and one or more text boxes will “be back” — then paste in the missing text, or code, into a ‘new’ Custom HTML box vs text box widget.
Something changed in PHP, WP core, widget logic, etc., which “broke” the footer element on NM3.
In one case we also had the main navbar at top reset to the above logo menu.
Obviously, updating to NM5 is advisable if not done yet. May need to redo home page layout, and reset some widgets for sidebars, but otherwise not too painful to update.
Hope that helps somebody. Kinda thought we got hacked, but we had not, just changes to core WordPress, PHP, etc., along with “old” method of putting HTML in text box widgets vs HTML box widgets that just borked the elements entirely.
🙂
For boken or deactivated menus
go to apperance > menus > manage locations
and reset menus used top/bottom of page/post as applicable.
Hi simchris,
Thank you for providing us with the essential steps to restore a website using an outdated theme like Newspaper v3. As you rightly pointed out, it is advisable for users with an older theme version to perform a complete backup and proceed with the theme update.
Thank you!
