Custom Blocks disappear from regions

By denomdub on 29 Oct 2012 at 07:30 UTC

Hello folks.
Hoping all is well..

I have a problem that has really really defeated me.
I created custom theme a theme whose code seems OK for a while.
I also cread some custom blocks which i published on the front page in prescribed regions. However, every morning i find them "region-less" i.e. region set to none and i have to re-assign them to their regions.

I have checked the error log, there's no error of any sort or anybody logging in to manually do this.
Does anybody have any idea what might cause this and why it keeps happening.

Kind regards,

Comments

Hi, Did you ever find a

niff commented 18 January 2013 at 07:37

Hi,

Did you ever find a solution or cause for this? I have exactly the same problem as you describe.

Regards

Same here

Webster619 commented 6 February 2013 at 14:48

I'm also having this problem. Only happens to custom regions.

I've tried updating both Drupal and my theme to the most current version.

______________________________________________________

Follow me at http://www.twitter.com/WebsterJ

This just happened to me too.

Ony commented 23 February 2013 at 20:24

This just happened to me too. Very frustrating, as this happened on my home page, and I set up about 6 different regions with different blocks, now I have to start over and I'm not sure what caused it or when it will happen again...

Also having this problem,

granholm commented 13 March 2013 at 09:25

Also having this problem, usually blocks dissappear from the active theme the night after we have done updates to the site involving reverting of features. First appeared after upgrading to 7.19, appeared again after upgrading to 7.21. Also nothing that would explain what happens shows up in the log.

Me, too

mmonclair commented 29 March 2013 at 14:05

I haven't done any changes to the core, I started with 7.9 (and get frequent messages to downgrade to 7.21!). I have to restore my home page daily, it's a real pain.

As this is an old topic, I'm going to pose the question again in the forums and see if I get an answer. When I do, I'll post it here.

A mysterious problem indeed

gausarts commented 29 March 2013 at 18:26

A mysterious problem indeed since some experienced this. My 2 cents:
Try using core bartik for a day, and see if it happens. If not, we narrow the problem to custom theme.

Maybe using switchtheme will help on production.

love, light n laughter

Things that make blocks dislodge

Diane Bryan commented 1 April 2013 at 03:07

In my brief experience, I've seen these causes dislodge blocks:

1. Reworking the region where block is placed using
a--customizations to page.tpl.php
b--AdaptiveTheme's gpanels that had been added to page.tpl.php but should have been added to the full width wrappers template when I clicked the full width wrappers checkbox
c--display suite
d--panels

2. Changing themes, then changing back

3. Updating theme (which may have been reworked since the version I had running)

4. someone I work with doing something similar to the above but thinking it wasn't going to affect me

5. Doing work on a theme in the folder /sites/all/themes, instead of doing the work in /sites/mysite.com/themes

Did you search the forums for the likely keywords, plus some unlikely ones? There could well be a post more summary than mine.

Best,
D

None of the above, except maybe 5...

mmonclair commented 2 April 2013 at 01:35

The customized blocks for my site are all in page--front.tpl.php.
I am using Zen theme as my base theme.
None of the assigned blocks are created from Panels (one is a Twitter widget, one is a feed, one is from Views Slideshow, and the other is the core Recent Content block)
I have not changed themes during development, nor updated it since having this problem

But #5... I'm curious about what you mean. My theme is in the /sites/all/themes folder. The other option I have is /sites/default/themes. The directions in the documentation for Zen said to put it in the /sites/all/themes folder.

I did do a number of keyword searches, and they pointed me to this thread. There is a change, though. It's now not happening every day, I went a couple of days before the disappearing blocks struck again this morning.

It has defeated me to

ikeigenwijs commented 13 April 2013 at 21:09

In d7
I also use zen
a custom region as footer with 1 block.

Stays there for a few days and than disappears.
In block view it is disabled.

No pannels, no other fancy stuff just add region, add block.

I don't think your issue is

gausarts commented 14 April 2013 at 05:06

I don't think your issue is related to Bean All module, but worth mentioning that the module is somewhat "responsible" for similar issue. Who knows some future seeker landed here due to unrealized Bean All features.

That Bean issue is not in the sense of "every-morning" disappearance though.

love, light n laughter

cache_block table?

mmonclair commented 15 April 2013 at 17:00

Here's a potentially silly question. In troubleshooting this, I started looking around for any tables that would store block assignments (I know that region assignments are stored in the region field of the block table). I found a series of cache tables, including cache_block. The other cache tables have records, but the cache_block table does not. Are there supposed to be records in this table?

This is getting more difficult for me to troubleshoot, as the occurrence of this problem is getting more random. I went almost a week, until this morning, before it happened again. Just to see if this makes any difference, I went back and disabled the caching of blocks.

Possible solution, but a problematic one

mmonclair commented 1 May 2013 at 15:14

I think I may have found a solution, for the short term, but it's not an optimal one. I turned off my daily cron and disabled caching of my site. I've gone about 6 days now without the blocks on my home page being dropped. This validates my suspicion that there is a caching issue in relation to the new custom regions and their blocks assignments. However, this has some serious drawbacks in performance and automated site maintenance. It also makes me wonder even more where this is coming from, since when I run a cron manually and clear the cache manually, I don't lose my blocks. So why is it only when this is reset automatically, in the middle of the night?

So I have a short-term solution, but I'm not happy with it. Any thoughts?

Update

mmonclair commented 21 April 2013 at 02:25

Uncaching blocks makes no difference.

Is number of people are working with same DB

er.pushpinderrana commented 23 April 2013 at 08:35

Hi Max Monclair,

I have read this complete thread and found you have almost tried every solution to debug this issue.

Can you please share with us, is more than one people working with same DB on this relevant site where you are facing this issue.

Pushpinder Rana #pushpinderdrupal
Acquia Certified Drupal Expert

Hi Pushpinder, At the moment

mmonclair commented 23 April 2013 at 13:15

Hi Pushpinder,
At the moment I am the only one using the database for this, and no other applications are using it.

I hit upon another idea, and did two more things to debug it:
1. I added my custom regions to the admin theme.
2. When this yielded no results, I set the admin theme to default and disabled the theme I had been using for it. The only themes I have enabled now are the core Zen theme and the subtheme I designed, both of which have the custom regions defined. I'll report back when I see any change in behavior.

Did anyone get to the root

lokapujya

English

Boston

commented 1 March 2014 at 01:36

Did anyone get to the root cause of disappearing blocks? I've just seen a similar issue. We also have Drupal 7 and have a Zen sub theme with custom regions. Bartik an Garland are also enabled.

We also had these PHP errors in the log:
Failed opening required 'docroot/sites/all/modules/contrib/flexslider/plugins/export_ui/flexslider_ctools_export_ui.inc' in docroot/sites/all/modules/contrib/ctools/includes/plugins.inc on line 475

We got this error message when we ran drush rr to rebuild the registry:
Error: Class 'Database' not found in/.drush/registry_rebuild/registry_rebuild.drush.inc, line 131

A fix perhaps!!

pivwani commented 15 October 2014 at 20:26

I had this issue when using ultimenu. The custom regions would be removed overnight and I would have to put the blocks back into their regions. I found that I needed make these regions permanent.

1 Go to your main theme folder sites/all/themes/yourtheme/yourtheme.info
(mine is acquia_marina.info)

2. add the custom regions to the bottom of the region list. For eg

regions[ultimenu_main_product_range] = Ultimenu:main: Product Range
regions[ultimenu_main_information] = Ultimenu:main: Information

Hopefully this helps