Widgets admin broken in IE7

[diddledani]

As per the thread here: ​http://wordpress.org/support/topic/widgets-admin-in-ie7

Widgets drag-and-drop does not work in IE7. The widget successfully appears in the sidebar after drag but the page does not save the new layout. Pre-existing widgets stay unchanged and any newly added widgets (to any sidebar) disappear after a page reload indicating they're not being saved.

(This may be incorrect on my assumption, but..) I believe the issue is due to the ID disappearing off the widget at the start of a drag action, meaning any further interactions with the widget are lost because the ID has been lost. The error message that IE7 produces at the drop action is as follows:

"'attr(...)' is null or not an object"

The related piece of code which causes the IE7 error message is in widgets.js line 146:

140	receive: function(e, ui) {
141		var sender = $(ui.sender);
142
143		if ( !$(this).is(':visible') || this.id.indexOf('orphaned_widgets') != -1 )
144			sender.sortable('cancel');
145
146		if ( sender.attr('id').indexOf('orphaned_widgets') != -1 && !sender.children('.widget').length ) {
147			sender.parents('.orphan-sidebar').slideUp(400, function(){ $(this).remove(); });
148		}
149	}

note the first part of the if statement uses the return value of sender.attr('id') as an object. IE7 alerts that this is a problem because the ID has disappeared so the return value of sender.attr('id') is correctly not an object. This is a byproduct of the actual problem which is the ID disappearing in the first place.

I cannot pinpoint where the ID is being stripped in the JavaScript, but it appears to be jquery-ui related?

[helen]

Big -1 to spending extra time fixing something up for IE7.

[azaozz]

Looks like UI bug. Also seeing this in IE7 on most (all?) elements used with UI Sortable <... id="widget-list" sizzle-1372711503799="[object Object]"> (converting object to string).

In any case our code should check if an ID exists before treating it as a string. Perhaps this:

var id;

if ( ( id = sender.attr('id') ) && id.indexOf('orphaned_widgets') != -1 && !sender.children('.widget').length ) {
	sender.parents('.orphan-sidebar').slideUp(400, function(){ $(this).remove(); });
}

[aaronholbrook]

I'm with Helen, -1 to supporting a seven year old browser.

[chriscct7]

IE 7 is not actively supported. Closing as wontfix