Jan
25th
Having recently upgraded to Wordpress 2.7, my “production” blogs have been suffering from a missing search widget in the sidebar. Curiously, my “test” installations on my local machine did not experience this sad loss. Wordpress 2.7 is, in my opinion, a wonderful release so I am very happy to say that I have at last manage to get to the root of my problem and fix it. Mea culpa, of course.
There had to a difference between my test and production system to explain the different behaviour. Since I had performed my Wordpress installations locally first, then simply copied the Wordpress directories and files up to the “production” server, it shouldn’t be anything different in the Wordpress files. That left my very own theme files, so I started looking for differences there.
I’d seen some comment in the source code for one of the Wordpress PHP files along the lines of, “use search form if one exists”. Lo and behold, in my theme files on the production systems, a very suspicious-looking searchform.php file. Oh look, there’s no file called searchform.php in my test installations. Crikey! A swift delete of searchform.php from the production system and after a quick refresh, as if by magic, my search widget made a miraculous reappearance in Traveblog and Gastroblog. Terrific, now I can search recipes by ingredient again.
Since I have absolutely no recollection of having put a searchform.php in my theme, I can only conclude that senility has taken hold. 
