Using "widget" as part of setting title breaks the customizer since 4.5

[steven_gardner]

Hi, My theme "Indie" had several customizer options that have the word "Widget" as part of the add_setting and add_control title:

'widget_bg'
'widget_txt'
'widget_txt_highlight'
'widget_txt_highlight_hover'

This broke the customizer completely showing no options other than the widget panel.

I've replaced these names and the customizer works again.

This problem was reported to me since 4.5 release.

Thanks
Steven

[ocean90]

Hello @steven_gardner, welcome to the WordPress Trac!

The same was reported two weeks ago on Slack too, see ​https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/core/p1459530599002514.

@westonruter:

Settings that are prefixed by widget_ are expected to be actual widgets, and the setting args for these are filtered for the needs of widgets. The dynamic setting filters are applying here, to also handle widgets that get created on the client before being persisted to the DB. So yes, consider this to be a reserved setting ID prefix.

[steven_gardner]

Thanks, sorry for the duplication.
I didn't see that ticket.

S

[westonruter]

@steven_gardner hi. It's not actually a duplicate, but just that it came up in conversation recently.

A potential solution to help avoid this problem in the first place is to change logic in \WP_Customize_Widgets::get_setting_args() to check if the matched id_base pattern in the regular expression ^widget_(?P<id_base>.+?)(?:\[(?P<widget_number>\d+)\])?$ actually corresponds to the ID base of a registered widget.

The immediate fix is to just not use widget_ as the prefix in your Customizer settings/controls, and this is what I'm going to update the Customizer API documentation to make note of, that the widget_ prefix is reserved for actual widgets.

[westonruter]

Replying to westonruter:

The immediate fix is to just not use widget_ as the prefix in your Customizer settings/controls, and this is what I'm going to update the Customizer API documentation to make note of, that the widget_ prefix is reserved for actual widgets.

See notice here: ​https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/advanced-topics/customizer-api/#setting-id-naming-convention-notice

[celloexpressions]

I would prefer for widget* and nav_manu* to be entirely reserved, since future changes there could add things that conflict with themes and plugins.

[ocean90]

#36841 was marked as a duplicate.

[celloexpressions]

I would now suggest closing this in favor of the documented restrictions on setting names (now here: ​https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/customize-api/customizer-objects/#settings).

Is there anything else that core can easily do to flag these restrictions?

[karmatosed]

I agree with the suggestion of closing this for now. If we do get other information to adjust this in the future we can always reopen but for now closing makes sense, thank you.