This has had me stumped for hours but I finally got to the bottom of it. I will do a more comprehensive article on this subject at a later date, but here is the issue and solution for those who come across this.

The issue

When dragging a widget into the widget area in the admin panel it successfully drags and seems to save but if you do a refresh of that page the widget has been removed from the widget area.

The solution

When declaring the widget ID and Widget name they need to have a relationship, the id needs to be the same as the name but lower case and spaces substituted for hypens, so below is a correct declaration for a widget area:


register_sidebar(array(
'id' => 'header-login',
'description' => __( 'The widget area for the logon form'),
'name' => 'Header Login',
'before_widget' => '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '',
'after_title' => '',
));

I hope this helps as it wasted 3 hours of my day 🙂