Permalinks setting causing the post text to disappear

  • A couple of days ago I suddenly started having issues with the text from posts I was publishing completely disappearing when I hit the publish button. They looked fine when I previewed them before publishing them but when I checked them after publishing, the text was gone and only the images could be seen.

    So I re-saved my permalinks settings (which were set to ‘Post Name’) and that didn’t change anything. I then disabled every plugin I have installed and published a brand new post with all the plugins disabled and that didn’t help.

    I’ve chatted with my hosting company numerous times and, in the end, the ‘fix’ was to set my permalinks setting to ‘Default’. Not ideal for SEO purposes but it’s the only way I can publish any posts and have the text show up.

    I’m using the latest version of WP which I updated to when it came out in mid-Sept and have published many posts since then with no problem. I’ve also got the latest version of the Genesis framework and my child theme installed and again, neither of these have had updates since early Sept.

    So I’ve ruled out a plugin or an issue with a recent theme update as being the culprit.

    But it’s like I’m turning a light switch on and off: When I set my permalinks to ‘Post Name’, all the text from my most recently published posts disappears completely. When I set the permalinks to ‘Default’, all the text magically reappears.

    And all along it’s only affected the most recently published posts; any posts I had published prior to the problem surfacing have never been affected.

    Here’s the URL to the site: https://www.birdingfever.com

    Can anybody help?

    Thanks!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    When I set the permalinks to ‘Default’, all the text magically reappears.

    If ‘Default’ works, then try reading Using_Permalinks before setting a custom permalink structure again. If clearing your Permalinks does not alleviate the issue, this could be attributed to anything from a web server configuration to a bad WordPress install.

    Thread Starter turtledove100

    (@turtledove100)

    If, by web server configuration you mean an issue on my hosting company’s side, they adamant that it has nothing to do with them or any of their servers.

    Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    If Using_Permalinks Codex guide did not help, try Enabling debugging and post the results.

    Thread Starter turtledove100

    (@turtledove100)

    I’m back. I’ve been chasing this issue around for the better part of 1 wk and it’s still happening. I switched hosting companies – from Bluehost to WP Engine but when I migrated my site over the problem persisted.

    So I got WPE tech support (which has been awesome BTW) on it. The first thing the tech agent did was switch me to the WP default 2015 theme, delete both Genesis and my child theme and then republish a post on the default theme. The problem was still there so it seems that we’ve ruled out a problem with the theme.

    The next thing he did seems to have solved the problem. I understand most of his explanation but it still doesn’t make total sense to me. Here’s what he said:

    Problem: When publishing a draft, the post would appear normal when previewing, but when viewing through the permalink URL after publishing, only the post image was being displayed.

    Reason: This was determined to be due to the post and image using the same post_name value in the database, causing the image to be loaded instead of the full post when accessing the permalink.

    When you visit a permalink ,WordPress will look in the bfposts table of the database for a row with a matching post_name value. WordPress will then load this row from the database, displaying the post content. However since the image and the post have the same post_name values, and the image was added to the database first, the image is loaded instead of the post.

    Solution: To prevent this issue, we simply need to change the title of the image (which is what the post_name value is created from) to something different than the post title. By changing the title of the image, the post_name value is changed as well. This prevents the image from being loaded instead of the post no matter what the order of the rows is.

    So as I understand it, basically he’s saying that it’s a WP glitch that happens from time to time but here’s what I don’t understand:

    It started happening all of a sudden and with no recent WP update. If it would have started happening right after a WP update then I could understand, but the fact is this: I published about 15 or 20 posts without any issues at all AFTER I’d updated WP and THEN it started happening.

    For SEO purposes, I use the exact same title for both the post itself and for the featured image title. His fix is to make the title of the image slightly different than the post title itself. So, for example, he went into the media library and added ‘img’ onto the end of the image titles for one of the posts, published that post and it worked just fine.

    This morning, after I’d received his answer, I went into my dashboard and published 7 posts that had been sitting in ‘draft’ form. 4 of them published just fine when I hit the ‘publish’ button but 3 of them, when I published them, lost all their content.

    So I went into the media library and added ‘img’ to the end of each image title for those 3 posts, went back and republished the posts and they published just fine. I did all of that within a 5 minute time frame.

    So his fix certainly seems to work but given that 4 of them published fine with just a stroke of the ‘publish’ button but the other 3 had to have altered image file titles in order to publish properly makes the problem very random in my mind.

    If it’s a WP glitch, why did 4 out of the 7 posts publish just fine? Can it be some sort of totally random WP glitch that hits some posts and not others?

    Can anyone make heads or tails out of this?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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