Widgets Reset: WordPress Plugin

Have your widgets ever been stuck in another widget area? Have they ever disappeared when you switched WordPress themes?

Well, this little plugin is for completely resetting your widgets back to the factory settings.

It’s not for moving widgets, saving widgets, or anything of the sort. When I say it resets your widgets, I really mean it. The slate is wiped completely clean.

Why create a plugin to reset widgets?

If you’ve hung out around the WordPress.org support forums lately, you’ve probably seen a few people wondering why their widgets disappeared when changing themes. I also had this same issue on one of the releases of the Hybrid theme.

Basically, widget areas (aka sidebars) with unique IDs will throw things off. Widgets are added according to a widget area’s ID. When you change themes that have different IDs, the widgets are no longer where you might expect them to be.

Download the Widgets Reset WordPress plugin

Note: If you have important information saved in something like a text widget, you better find a way to save it before resetting your widgets because you'll lose that information. In short, don't complain if you lose widget information that you decided to reset.

See the readme.html file in the plugin download for full instructions.

How to manually reset your widgets

Actually, this plugin just provides a pretty interface. You really don’t need the plugin. A simple way to do this would be to drop the below code in your theme’s functions.php file and hit refresh on your browser.

<?php update_option( 'sidebars_widgets', $null ); ?>

Then, just remove it. But, if the thought of adding PHP code scares you, just use the plugin.