This might be useful for WordPress widget developers out there. I wasn’t going to post this before, but I just found that another developer ran into the exact same issue. So hopefully the 10 minutes I spend writing this post can help save somebody hours of debug.
After WordPress 2.5 released I found that my NowThen Photo Display widget broke the sidebar management page in WordPress adminitration. I took the longest time to figure out why, but the root of the problem was that the new WordPress 2.5 actually executes widget code in the wp-admin area. I have no idea why this is the case. Is this a bug or a feature of the new 2.5 code? I can see it as a feature in a sense that, if the code is not able to executed properly in the wp-admin area, then it should not be added to the front-end. If that’s the case, I would expect an error message rather than a broken sidebar management page.
Anyhow, here are a couple of tips that I have if your plugin breaks after the upgrade: Read on…
