After moving my site from staging to live, my menus are no longer editable: I can run a sync between languages, but: strings are not being updated in the string translation, when I want to switch between menus all menus appear 4 times in the dropdown menu (screenshot) and when switching between languages from the language menu in the top bar, the translated menus are empty.
I tried to make a new menu, but the problems are the same and strings are not being registered for translation in the string translation.
Something must have gone wrong when moving the site from staging to live, but I can't revert as this is a shop and I would lose all new order data.
Ordinarily we would want to investigate the problem on a staging site, but in this case the staging site works fine and it is only in production that you have the problem, right?
I'm reluctant to work on your production site in case anything goes wrong.
Are you able to make a copy of the production site available on a development server that we could work on together?
If so, please do, and let me know when you have it available.
I'll set up a private reply now to get credentials for it if that's possible.
If you can't do that, let me know and we can explore other options.
I made a clone of my site and offcourse, now the problem there is gone there.
More information: after creating the clone I checked the menus and the problem was there; then I performed an update of the plugins and this made the problem disappear. I will now try to perform the update on the live site and see if this makes any change.
I made the updates on the live site and at first there was no change, however, after clearing all cache I got back the menus as they should be. So I'm relieved it works again, but not sure if this is a real fix.
Could the menu translation have a conflict with any caching?
I want to add some more information: after my last comment I was able to edit the menus in the normal way, but 10 minutes later the problem was there again. Flushing the cache did not do the trick but flushing the object cache does.
The site is hosted at Cloudways.
Have you got any solution on how to avoid this. I will temporarily disable the object cache as its not reliable at the moment.
I checked with my colleagues who suspected it may be theme-related—apparently some themes use caching with menus—but you are using Hello Elementor, which doesn't.
Though, actually, you are using a child theme. Is there anything in the child theme that may modify this? Can you switch to the Hello Elementor parent theme, activate object caching, and see if the problem re-appears or not?
I did swicth back and forth between child theme and parent theme and was not able to trigger the error again.
Object caching: I'm using Cloudways and object caching is activated from the server, with a drop-in plugin that controls the object caching from the WP admin (for clearing object cache or disabling it)
I just reviewed the cloned site again today and in the Child Theme the problem is back. After flushing object cache, the problem is gone again.
In the parent theme I was not able to reproduce the problem (yet) (apart from the problem still being there before I flushed the object cache from the Child Theme)
Could I get a copy of the child theme? And in the meantime leave the parent theme active, and see if it is possible to trigger the problem with the parent active—or not, in which case we can focus on the child theme.
If you share a dropbox link or similar, it will be automatically hidden.
I recreated a new child theme and deleted the files I don't necessarily need, certainly not in staging, just to see if the problem returns. It does.
With the parent theme I was not able to recreate the bug (as of now), so it must be something with or in the child theme.
I've looked through your child theme, it's only really the functions.php file that looks relevant here, but I can't see anything that would affect caching of menus. (The only reference to menus is to register a menu 'additional-menu'.)
I'm wondering if you still have a test with the parent theme ongoing? Can we still say that the issue only occurs with the child theme, when object caching is enabled, and not when the parent theme is active (with object caching enabled).?
