On Friday March 8th, 2024, our sidebar menu went blank and none of the menu items was displaying.
Tried as we could, we could not figure out what the issue was.
Eventually, we had to disable the PRO version.
Once PRO version was disabled, the unformatted, un-styled menu items started displaying again.
Do you guys have any ideas what could be wrong?
We are already on the latest versions of WordPress and PHP.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Britton,
Version 9.4.2 of the PRO plugin had a bug in it which could cause a page to be marked as excluded in the database even though it appears to not be excluded on the page edit screen. The bug has since been fixed in version 9.5.0 of PRO but affected pages would need some manual steps.
More information may be found in this thread.
If that doesn’t work, please let us know and we’ll assist in troubleshooting.
Thank you for your prompt response.
Our situation appears to be different.
It might be caused by the bug you referenced in your reply.
However, in our situation, the entire menu is gone, not just for some missing pages but for all pages.
We have several departments, each department uses sidebar menu to organize their menu items and there are literally 100s of pages affected.
Hi Britton,
Since we are unable to view your site, here are some items which will help us track the issue down.
Ok, thanks for your response again.
I will have to wait till tonight to provide all of the items you asked for specifically because I will need to turn on the error display in our config file (your question #2) and wouldn’t want to do this during working hours.
In the meantime, here are answers to questions 3 through 5:
Advanced Sidebar Menu – Free version: Version 9.5.0
Advanced Sidebar Menu – PRO version: Version 9.5.0
Current Version of PHP: 8.2.15 (Supports 64bit values)
I have figured a way to send two screenshots of what happens when we disable PRO version and use only FREE version vs what happens when PRO version is enabled.
Please check private information section.
If the department pages all have a common parent page like “Departments” then all the department menus will display blank if the “Department” page is excluded. Any pages which are children of an excluded page will also not display. A Departments page, or any top level parent for that matter, could have become excluded if the page was edited while version 9.4.2 was active.
Another change which happened a couple version ago fixed an edge case were a top level parent was excluded but child pages were still displaying. It is possible the block/widget has the parent(s) listed in excluded pages which had no effect on child pages until recently.
Just a couple of things to double check while we wait for the database dump.
Just a silly question, how do I exclude a page?
Do you do this with some plugin?
I am trying to figure this out but so far, no success.
A page may be excluded either in the block/widget settings or on the page edit screen.
More information may be found here.
Hi Britton,
Version 9.5.1 of the PRO plugin has been released just now which will automatically clear out any unintended excludes.
Please update the plugin and let me know if the issue is not resolved.
Have a great day!
The menu also disappeared on my wordpress site.
Do you have archive for download, so i can downgrade to a working version. I found a backup Version 8.3.1 that works fine.
Hello Britton,
We have completed an internal discovery of the issue and written an article describing what happened. For more information see this article.