Custom menu / navigation error

How many items do you have in your menu?

On most servers there’s a limit on how many POST variables can be sent in one request, and (there’s debates about this being good or bad…) WordPress sends back a whole lot of POST fields for each menu item. From what I’ve personally seen and read most servers will handle between 75 and 90 items before they start dropping the last ones off.

If that’s what’s happening on your site, you can hopefully get around this be adding a php.ini file in the /wp-admin/ folder with this content:

<IfModule mod_php.c>

php_value suhosin.simulation 1

php_value suhosin.memory_limit 128M
php_value suhosin.post.max_vars 5000
php_value suhosin.request.max_vars 5000

</IfModule>

max_input_vars = 5000

It’s a good idea ot set up a new file/page as well with phpinfo() on it so you can check if the settings have taken effect. If they have, try again. If not, talk to your hosting company as a lot of places block custom php.ini files.

I’l guarantee that what I’m describing is your problem. I’ve seen it many times on sites that I manage with exactly the same symptoms.

Why has it started happeningnow? I can’t tell you that, but I can givea few possibilities. First, you probably hit the limit of your server settings where you hadn’t before. Second, the server may have had some updates that changed the limits, Third, your hosting company may have set the limits lower and not informed you. There’s more but those are the most likely.

What I’ve proposed is quite easy to do. Just create a new file called php.ini, add what I had above to it and save it, then upload it to the /wp-admin/ directory in your web hosting.

Yes, you can do it in NotePad, or any other text-based editor of your choice. Just nothing like Word or WordPad as those aren’t plain-text editors.