If you are editing multiple widget sets simultaneously, make sure to Publish or Update after adding new widgets. Do not add new widgets to multiple sets simultaneously, without first doing an Update.

My guess is that the same widget (i.e. check the text widget id) has been added to each set. One way to fix this, is to put in a new text widget, and put the old text widget in the Inactive Widgets section. Don’t delete it, just put it in the Inactive section. Then save the widget set.

It is easiest to edit widget sets singly which will avoid this issue – which has to do with how widgets are created in WordPress native. It has nothing to do with the copy operation which creates new copies of each of the widgets. Or you can use Widget Logic where there is only a single widget set, and conditionals on each widget to control where they appear.

I change the content of widget 3 in widget Set A
and without doing anything the content of widget 3 in widget Set B was changed, too.

I didn’t marked the option or the field to “propagate settings across widget wide …” !!!
But when I created the widget sets, I copied them and then changed the name and permalink. Maybe they are related because of that ?

But they have different IDs ! I don’t know what else I could do. maybe I could create whole new widget sets instead of copying them, but that is much work (25 widget sets with about 20 widgets each).

At the moment I get mad because I have about 25 Widget Sets. Not every time, but very often I change s.th. in a text-widget in Set A, the same change is appearing in Set B and Set C. There must be a relation between some widget sets, but I don’t know which and how this is possible.
I want to create widget sets independently from each other, the shouldn’t be connected in some way. Is there a option I was overlooking.
Do you have an idea, what the problem could be? best regards and many thanks Louis

Please let me know if the problem persists.

I ve research in www and found a lot of news / infos regarding that message and WP 3.5. –> All of them are giving the advice to tell this to the plugin-author because of a security lack. The error itself is not a problem for the functionality of the plugin, but it seems to be one regarding the security of the db. please check this post -> http://make.wordpress.org/core/2012/12/12/php-warning-missing-argument-2-for-wpdb-prepare/

Many thanks for this great plugin !!

cheers Louis

The multi-column widget simply allows me to split a single widget area into multiple columns. I can insert existing widgets (e.g. recent comments, recent posts, etc.) into my multi-column widget, and it helps to lay it out properly according to certain settings, such as number of columns and maximum height.

For featuring products/articles/links I usually use a gallery.

Then, if I wanted to, I could place multiple galleries into a multi-column layout using the multi-column widget. In other words -

1. The mc-widget just does multi-column layouts for existing widgets.
2. I use a gallery to show thumbnail images, article links, and descriptions.