Solution:
I have tried so many things over the last few days.
A few suggestions were:
- .live jQuery function – Replace it with .on JQ function with a few additional adjustments. – Did not work
- Activate the classic editor plugin – https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/ – Did not work
- Activate the jQuery Migrate plugin – https://wordpress.org/plugins/enable-jquery-migrate-helper – Did not work
- Remove gutenberg support by placing
remove_theme_support( 'widgets-block-editor' )in functions file – Did not work
The more I read about the issue it sounded like it was the new widgets section causing it. So I then saw WordPress brought out a new plugin called Classic Widgets. Once I activated this plugin it fixed my issue immediately.
So for anyone else running into this issue. Check out the classic widgets plugin – https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-widgets/
This is pretty much all it does
// Disables the block editor from managing widgets in the Gutenberg plugin.
add_filter( 'gutenberg_use_widgets_block_editor', '__return_false' );
// Disables the block editor from managing widgets.
add_filter( 'use_widgets_block_editor', '__return_false' );
So instead of using that plugin you can add the above 2 lines to your functions.php file then that should fix it.
Hope this will save someone 4 days of struggling like I did. Now I need to figure out why it is breaking the theme when using New Block Widgets.