I recently switched a test blog in 4.21 from static to dynamic publishing. After doing so, the sidebar widgets didn't show up. I was able to bring them back by reseting the site to static publishing. I then tried changing the publishing settings to Dynamic Archives Only. The static pages showed the sidebar widgets, but not on the dynamic pages.
Does anyone know why my Sidebar Widget Set isn't showing up with dynamic publishing?
Reported on Movable Type 4.2
I don't mean this as a non-sequitor, but why are you using dynamic publishing? The reason I ask is that from a technical point of view, it's generally a very dangerous way of delivering your blog, especially if it's important to have a high uptime.
The main reason I bring this up is that even WordPress is moving away in many respects from dynamic publishing; most WordPress blogs rely VERY heavily on caching the content generated by WordPress so that it can be reused for performance reasons.
I'm currently using static publishing and I'm testing the feasibility of using dynamic publishing. With over 1200 entries and more added daily, static publishing is becoming more difficult to manage.
It's very disheartening when a core feature, sidebar widgets, fails in dynamic publishing.
If you think that's bad, then just wait until your database server goes down for maintenance, and all your readers see on your blog is an error page--something that's pretty normal for dynamic publishing platforms like WordPress.
If performance is the issue for you, then enable template module caching on things like the footer, banner header and most of your sidebar widgets. I have closing in on 1,600 entries and pages, and it takes me only about 7-8 minutes to do a rebuild of my entire blog because of the caching mechanism.
I should also add that I'm also publishing 3 individual archives per entry too: 1 with underscores, one with dashes in the name (I did this to ease up the load on mod_rewrite when I transitioned from _ to -) and one that generates a RSS feed of the comments for that entry. And it still takes < 10 minutes on average!