[Resolved] Footer stopped displaying when I installed WP Types and started using layout

[Author]

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[robinS-3]

I am trying to: Have a page display correctly however when I add widgets to my footer area they do not display on the live site. When I reported this to the theme owners, they told me to talk to you. You can see the question I asked here: hidden link

Link to a page where the issue can be seen: On the homepage of the site or on the <site>/ico/amc/ - It happens on every page. I'd rather not use the name of the site in a public forum. Note the site is closed via basic auth at the moment while under development. Access details for that are included below. I have tried disabling basic auth to see if it brings back the footer but it makes no difference.

I expected to see: The footer divided into three sections as per: hidden link

Instead, I got: The page is displaying the layout and header correctly however the footer is not displaying. I don't want to disable the layouts plugin to test it as I'm worried all the work I've done will disappear and I've done so much work on the layouts. If there is a way for me to create a site wide footer with WP Types instead of my theme, then I'm fine with doing that as well. In fact, if I could just dump the whole cornerstone theme in favour of wp types then I would but I don't know enough about how wordpress works to do that. Love the Toolset plugins however I cannot figure out why the footer refuses to display after trying different things for a day.

[Nigel]

Hi Robin

I have a local test site with X-theme installed alongside the Toolset plugins, including Layouts, and I don't experience any problems with the appearance of the footer.

When I visit your pages I can see that the footer is not added to the page markup at all.

I suspect if you check you may find PHP errors in your logs. Are you familiar with WP debugging?

If you haven't already, turn on the debug log by editing your wp-config.php file and change the line with WP_DEBUG like so:

define('WP_DEBUG', true);
ini_set('log_errors',TRUE);
ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL);
ini_set('error_log', dirname(__FILE__) . '/error_log.txt');

That will create a debug log called error_log.txt in your root directory (the same location as wp-config.php) which you can examine in any text editor. Try visiting any page on the front end and then inspect the log.

Let me know what you find.

[robinS-3]

Hi Nigel,

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I enabled logging and then refreshed the homepage however all I got in the log was an error that was generated from a plugin that is a csv importer. It appears to happen every few seconds (as I haven't put a field in) and doesn't appear to have anything to do with the layout or occur when I refresh the homepage. I've also tried disabling that plugin but it makes no difference. Exact log output is:

[02-May-2018 13:04:41 UTC] PHP Notice: Undefined index: send_user_password in /nas/content/live/user/wp-content/plugins/wp-importer-customfields-pro/includes/class-uci-email-scheduler.php on line 19
[02-May-2018 13:05:40 UTC] PHP Notice: Undefined index: send_user_password in /nas/content/live/user/wp-content/plugins/wp-importer-customfields-pro/includes/class-uci-email-scheduler.php on line 19
[02-May-2018 13:05:53 UTC] PHP Notice: Undefined index: send_user_password in /nas/content/live/user/wp-content/plugins/wp-importer-customfields-pro/includes/class-uci-email-scheduler.php on line 19

Any other suggestions? Maybe there is some flag that I haven't clicked to get the footer to appear but I've gone through everything I can think of to test.

Many thanks,
Rob

[robinS-3]

By the way, I also checked the source in the browser (as I thought it might be a css issue as that was all I could find when I searched Google for several hours) however I too saw that for some reason it's not even being output. Very strange.

[Nigel]

Hmm. I was expecting some clue as to the problem in the logs.

Can you rule out the possibility of conflicts with 3rd party code. Although this seems to be a theme-related issue, can you try switching to twentyseventeen and confirm that the footer *does* display then? And whether it works correctly if you use the parent rather than the child theme. Also, de-activate your non-Toolset plugins and see whether another plugin is interfering in some way.

Switching theme and de-activating plugins won't cause you to lose anything.

If none of that helps I may need to take a copy of your site, but I'll wait to hear back from you.

[robinS-3]

Thanks Nigel, that was great - switching between the two themes allowed me to see that I had somehow added in a customer footer page to the child theme that was interfering. Removing that and some css tweaks has fixed the issue. I really appreciate the help you've provided!