3/17/25 Update
This theme has not been updated for over 2 years. That means that you shouldn’t use it for your website. But, it was a great little theme, when it was supported. The weird thing is that it’s still available on WordPress.com. That makes me wonder how robust their service really is.
Background
The following is an example of why a theme or plugin’s support response and history are important. When something goes wrong, you need an answer. It’s also an example of why you should keep track of whether a theme is still supported and updated. Note, a theme or plugin can slide into abandonment unexpectedly, but it can also be resuscitated just as unexpectedly.
Note that this discussion is about a specific WordPress theme, but the general idea relates to any technology theme you might use.
What Happens When You Contact Support?
This is the support forum thread for the mysteriously appearing social media icons after an update to the Basic theme.
ME: I have installed Basic on two sites. With the recent update on those sites, the sidebars are being activated before the Save is activated. And, it adds a set of social media buttons to the sidebars. This is only happening on sites with the Basic theme.
THEME AUTHOR: Could You more cleared write about this? What You do step by step and what You see?
ME: Thank you for your reply! After every widget in a sidebar added in a child theme, there is this code.
<div class=’social_share clearfix’><p class=’socshare-title’></p>
<a rel=”nofollow” class=”psb fb” target=”_blank” href=”http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://youpasteinvisualarts.com/&t=Home+Page&src=sp” title=”Share in Facebook”></a>
<a rel=”nofollow” class=”psb vk” target=”_blank” href=”http://vkontakte.ru/share.php?url=http://youpasteinvisualarts.com/” title=”Share in VK”></a>
<a rel=”nofollow” class=”psb ok” target=”_blank” href=”https://connect.ok.ru/offer?url=http://youpasteinvisualarts.com/&title=Home+Page” title=”Share in OK”></a>
<a rel=”nofollow” class=”psb gp” target=”_blank” href=”https://plus.google.com/share?url=http://youpasteinvisualarts.com/” title=”Share in Google+”></a>
<a rel=”nofollow” class=”psb tw” target=”_blank” href=”http://twitter.com/share?url=http://youpasteinvisualarts.com/&text=Home+Page” title=”Share in Twitter”></a>
</div>
THEME AUTHOR: It is Basic’s social sharing buttons
https://github.com/wppuzzle/basic/blob/master/inc/hooks.php#L132
But… after widget? Buttons display after post content. Try check the Basic without child theme
ME: Here is a link: http://youpasteinvisualarts.com/forest-guardian-mask-gallery/
This was only a problem after the theme update. The problem is now affecting the Sidebar which is a theme default.
THEME AUTHOR: It is look like your custom sidebar apply the_content filter to widgets text
ME: This has been a very interesting problem, which I have been documenting in my records and reporting details on Facebook and my website.
I believe that the flow is:
1. There is a child theme based on Basic as the parent theme.
2. There are sidebars registered in the child theme.
3. The Content Block plugin is installed.
– Note that Content Blocks are a Custom Post Type, which means that the_content() would indeed be involved from the WordPress core functions.
4. The Content Block plugin has a widget function that allows Content Blocks to be added into sidebars.
I believe that your theme has a bug that affects the functionality of adding widgets to sidebars. At first the problem only showed up as one set of social media icons per page. But it has degraded severely, to affect all widgets in sidebars.
Background and Technologies Used
- WordPress, a website Content Management System (CMS)