Wordpress 2.2 Widgets: K2 to the Rescue!


Blogan, on the K2 forums, has posted a great plugin that disables Wordpress 2.2’s built-in widget support so that you can use your favorite widget plugin, such as Sidebar Modules. This is a great temporary solution to the current issue with Subtle not showing widgets correctly on WP 2.2 and is even better for those of us who don’t like to use Automattic’s widget interface.

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Not sure what I’m doing wrong but I install the fix and I get the sidebar menu item but I can’t add anything to it. When I select the module and click add nothing happens and it seems to lock that page up. Any ideas?

I’m getting something similar as Ryan.
When i try to add a module to the sidebar, i get a message saying:”You must specify a valid module name”. Of course, i did specify a valid name.
Using WP 2.2, the K2 disable widgets plugin and subtle 0.391.

Yup, this plugin worked. Thanks!

Anyone knows when this issue will get fixed? It’s been almost a week since 2.2 has been released, I will probably switch to another theme (temporarly)

Nina, How did you get it to work? I’m getting the same errors Ryan and Fadi get.

DH - I’d still recommend sticking with an earlier version of WP. So far, 2.2 has proven to be a problematic install. I’ve been checking the WP forums and it appears that 2.2 really messed a lot of stuff up, so I’m a little wary about making big changes to Subtle in case they start fixing things.

Regarding the plugin - I’ve just installed it, activated it, and then everything worked.

Odd. I can’t for the life of me get SBM to work. Will Auttomatic’s widgets plugin work or has that been rendered totally useless with the new widgets functionality in WP? I guess I might end up downgrading to WP 2.1.3. Such a bad word, downgrading.

Looking in the forums over at http://www.gluedideas.com/support/viewtopic.php?id=22 i found this:

I googled the problem and found a solution on the K2 forums.
http://getk2.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4187

I downloaded K2 v0.95rc1 and followed the instructions from the K2 forums and now SBM works.

It turns out that SBM as a standalone plugin isn’t being maintained and the errors people are experiencing have nothing to do with Subtle. I’ve got a fixed version of the SBM plugin, but I need to check out the licensing to see if I can post it here.

works fine and thanks for the temp help.

The link for SBM in the post isn’t working for me at all. Chris could you email me the fixed SBM plugin? Let me know, thanks.

Hi Chris!
Please, email me the fixed SBM plugin too, which would work on WP2.2.
I’d be really grateful.
Thanks A lot!

Hi there, I got same problem with others. I got error msg ”You must specify a valid module name”. I use WP 2.0.1, anybody can help me? thx.

Iroel, go to comment no. 8 by Fadi, and in the second link over there, there is a pretty good hack given for this problem.
I got the exact same problem; and yesterday tried that hack and it worked brilliantly!

P.S. Thanks Fadi!

P.P.S. Thanks Chris, but seems you needn’t email the patched up SBM ;)

Yes! LoL! I almost lost my hope and almost changed my template into 2.2.1 supported theme! Thanks for this, got it working again :)

[...] Widget support that it broke my Sidebar Widget plugin. So, I googled and found a way to fix it here. The solution: disable the built-in widget by using this plugin and use the old sidebar widget [...]

The reason the SBM plugin is giving the ‘You must specify a valid module name’ error is that it uses the version of the Prototype library bundled with Wordpress, which is much newer than the version of Prototype that SBM was written for.

I’ve updated the SBM plugin, which you can download from here: http://dynamicflash.com/downloads/misc/sbm-fixed.zip

For those interested, the fix involved disabling the form *after* using the Prototype library to get the form data, as it turns out that Prototype ignores disabled form fields when gathering data.

I am using your subtle theme. Since the widget for sidebar is on the brink, I found the codex for inserting the blogrolls into my sidebar.php — now, I need to find the codex for “recent comments.” I search the docs in wordpres.org without sucess of finding it.

I dont know much english so:

Gracias por arreglar el plug in Steve.
Me funcionó perfecto

Sidebar Modules don’t seem to be working at all with WP 2.2 I tried using the “fixed” version, and the plugin appears broken. Can anyone guide me here?

using the fixed version … but im still having issues whereby after reloading the page, the “modules” disappear from sidebar1 , sidebar2 , etc….

I installed both the sidebar modules and the one that disables 2.2’s built in widgets and everything worked fine - until now. For some reason I can no longer ‘move’ my modules and I don’t recall changing anything that could have triggered this. Any ideas?

Just upgraded to 2.3, seems this broke sidebar modules. (maybe prototype is deprecated?). Do you know of any recent fixes, or how to pull the latest sbm out of k2?

Integrating widgets into the core of WP seems to me to be a huge step backward. One of the things I love about Subtle is that with something like sidebar modules or Automattic’s WP Widgets, the site is infinitely customizable, and having the ability to just drag and drop widgets anywhere is priceless — and it’s also one of the reasons why I refuse to update past the 2.1 series of WP. I think they’re really going in the wrong direction. In fact, 2.0.6 was the last WP release I actually liked. The problem isn’t with Subtle, it’s WP.

I would advise against upgrading to 2.3 if you plan to keep using Subtle. I’ve come to look at my theme as more than just the aesthetic groove to my site; it’s total control software.

I cant seem to add anything to the sidebar menu! Help???!

I’ve had some problems too. I’ll be watching for solutions. If anyone comes up with any please post.