What Controls Formatting in WP-Admin?

You are correct, one or more of your stylesheets aren’t loading. The admin stylesheets are in, or should be in, wp-admin/css. The main ones are wp-admin.css and the color-*.css ones. You can tell by the names roughly what they do.

So, check to see that they are actually there. Then check the file permissions on the directory. Then disable your plugins and switch to the default theme and see if that helps. Then it gets tricky. Hopefully it is solved before we get there.

The CSS files all seem to be OK. I did a fresh download of 3.4.2, and the file sizes are all the same.

The css folder has permissions 755 and the contained files 644. These are standard for my host and have never caused a problem with WordPress.

So I guess I have to do the hard thing. What makes this particularly frustrating is the fact that this site was working fine under a different domain. I had to move it to this new domain, and that’s where the problem originated.

I changed all the old domain references in the database to the new one, using the Search Replace plugin. I also use phpMyAdmin to search for the old domain, and no instances were found.

I’ll be back after I try disabling the plugins. I don’t even like to think about messing with the theme. ??

Lane

Install the FireFox plugin HttpFox, enable it, and load the admin page. You will see items highlighted in red where there is a problem. Maybe you can see why there is a problem as well.

HttpFox didn’t find anything to mark.

Disabling the plugins and changing the theme didn’t affect the results.

I enabled Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu and that cleaned things up since it works right. I also added ToolBar Removal – RC which got rid of the garbage related to the accursed toolbar.

In addition to the way things look, some of the operations in the admin section seem not to work right. For example, clicking the “Select All” box at the top of the plugins does nothing.

I’m wondering about the icons that show at the top. They are not supposed to be there. It looks like: Home Link Graphic Document (or Copy) Plugins Tools and others. The same icons show up in both Firefox and Chrome.

Lane

If HttpFox didn’t mark anything it seems that either 1) the stylesheets are all loading, which doesn’t seem right, or 2) something has de-registered one or more admin stylesheets, which would mean that either your theme or a plugin is messing with the backend.

Those icons are supposed to be there. You are just supposed to see only a small part of the image at any one time. They are called sprites. The reason you see the whole image is because of the CSS failure.

Trying to think of some way to re-build the site without losing everything, I wonder if this would work:
1. Create a new empty database.
2. Rename wp-config.php to wp-config0.php.
3. Visit the domain and run the WP install, supplying the new database name to produce a new wp-config.php.
4. Start putting things together again piece by piece.

The advantage would be that all the uploaded stuff (plugins, theme, media) would be there, ready to be used. I don’t know if the Media Library would be recognized as being in place.

If, during the rebuild, it was necessary to look at the old posts and pages, a rename of the two wp-config.php’s could get you back to the old site.

Have you ever heard of someone doing something like that?

Lane

You will have trouble with the media library. There is a lot of information in the database that would not be recreated if you do what you are thinking of doing.

That’s what I was afraid of… and this site has a lot of images.

This might be a good time to be a MySQL expert. Maybe I could build a new db from the old one.

Lane