kbarncat

Jonto – I really appreciate the fact that you found these solutions and then came back here to the discussion to share with us the fixes. It’s such a helpless feeling for us non-tech types to have program problems affect our lives like this. When we pool what we learn, it’s so valuable, and so human – to share what works with others. So thanks very much.

jonto – okay. May I ask you some things? I don’t see here what your specific problem is – assuming that it’s the visual editor. White copy? No menus? Html showing up in your visual side? Are you self hosted or wordpress.com? I started a thread in another place – I can’t remember the title “Visual Editor not working Personal Topic” or something – just do the “visual editor personal” in the search field and you’ll probably find it. Some good input in there.

It strikes me that it might help you – assuming that you have good .xml backups – to simply start from scratch. Create a new blog in 3.3 and import your file. See if that helps. We spent days going through our mysql databases word for word and finally pinned down the area of trouble – but if you can start fresh, maybe whatever weirdnesses you might have in your code – corruptions or incomplete re-writes – would be history. It’s a pain to have to re-define your options, but not as much as trying to mess with a corrupted editor.

Are you in 3.3?

Okay – this was MY personal topic. I have been messing with the problems in the editor for months – after spending tens of hours finding the problem that crippled the editor in our case.

BUT HERE IS WHAT I HAVE TO SAY:

The upgrade to 3.3 – though I will admit I have not actually worked heavily with it yet – seems to have solved all ills and presented us with a very nice interface. My hitches with the editor are simply gone. All is well with the world. Fingers crossed as I put it through its paces later.

Scrub the last comment. I went ahead and checked it out. I did find the files you pointed out, and I did find the

https://yoursite.org/wp-includes/js/tinymce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js

missing. However – my journey with this problem is documented at

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/321-visual-editor-broken-personal-topic?replies=30

And in that account, I explain how we had to replace the WP-options file before anything would work after upgrading. I got the functionality of the editor back, except that I could no longer insert Flickr codes into the html (insert all photos, one after another, then save draft to lock in the html) then go to the visual side, place a cursor on the after side of a photograph and use the return key on the keyboard to create a space for copy between the top photo and the following one. I have been working this way for years in WP, and suddenly no longer could.

Looking at your fix, I was hoping (though I couldn’t really see how this would help) that I might restore than functionality to my mostly working editor. But what I found is that, not only did the fix not change anything – I was already working with a mostly functional editor EVEN THOUGH THE LANGS FILE was missing.

There is evidently something so flakey about the TINYmce code that any number of small things can break its functionality. So while your fix has worked for you, and others have found other things – like the extra colon thing – the problem may still persist for others because their combination of oddities just happen to break the dang thing, too. The editor needs editing.

I’m out of state, so not able to check things like I’d like to – but I am very excited about what you’ve discovered and plan to follow up soon as I get home. Thanks achellios. Maybe this will clear up some of the function problem I have since we got our editor back on line. Mostly.

Okay. Good. Inconvenient, but good. I think I’ve even seen this happen a couple of times. And worked around it by saving the draft before I switched tabs. Thank you. Every tiny bit of understanding helps. I LOVE code. LOVE it. But it’s not my focus, so it’s hard to corral everything and keep it understood. thank you again.

Aren’t you guys running Askemet? It’s great, and you don’t have to worry about this junk.

The problem is that I can’t insert this code on the visual side. And I have to see the shots to write the captions. So I’m stuck.

I’ve been doing it this way for years quite happily – until last week when we upgraded. Maybe just dumb luck I haven’t had trouble before, then.

I know you don’t have time to answer this, esmi – dang. I want to learn. But how does the mark-up change? I mean what happens to it? By mark-up, you mean the html code? I wish I knew more.

Oh, and thank you for reading this. I can see that you’ve been on for hours trying to help people with much worse trouble.

Jenny – I only know a little, myself. But when you change themes, you don’t lose anything. The themes are like skins that fit over your basic information. Your widgets, settings, etc. are all preserved when you switch themes. So you don’t have to be afraid of that.

Go into your dashboard, call up a post to edit. If the visual editor tab is selected – wait, are you saying there is NO visual editor tab, no HTML tab? Or are you just missing the editing options? Do you see text in the edit window? Does it have html characters in it, or is it just straight text?

I can’t help you if the tabs aren’t there. I’ve not run into that problem myself (thank heavens). But the smart people here will tell you: try another theme and see if that fixes it. If not, turn off your plug-ins, if you have any (I see that you’re only running importer – but it may be causing something so try turning it off). But do these things one at a time, checking each time to see if there’s a diff.

There is a very nice master-list for trouble-shooting that will teach you a lot.

I am no esmi = but I recently, in redoing a bunch of my own blogs, evidently trashed one of them. I looked everywhere on the server and the files were simply gone. But when I went to my server admin area, clicked on my databases – I found the database still there. It’s a tricky thing to do, messing with the database on line. But I found the wp-posts table and was able to “edit” each line (each post has its own line). I could then copy and paste the content into a text file, just to make sure I didn’t lose any of the posts. This doesn’t really address your particular problems – only, it gave me great relief to find that the database was still there. Eventually I set up a new site and tied it to that database.

The one thing I will say is that regular backups can save a ton of heartache. Both of database and content. The “export” function under “tools” in your dashboard makes a lovely back up and is easily done.

Again – we’re on Mac, running Snow Leopard. Server is PHP 5 capable. WP 3.2.1 Problem showed up after upgrade. Plug-ins de-activated. Widgets all emptied.

Okay – this problem is really driving me nuts.

I wish somebody could go here: https://www.ponymoon.com/TestSite and take a look at what I’m talking about. It doesn’t seem like a major problem – but it’s in the coding somehow. We’re reproducing it in several sites, some related, some discrete.
We have also done a video of the problem: https://tinyurl.com/3ffcmuk

The question is: what would make the return key (so simple a key) suddenly start inserting html non breaking line codes instead of doing its universally expected job? And it ONLY does this when the cursor is placed just after an image code link. The behavior seems bizarre. Not many people may notice it, but I work in image heavy blog articles, and it’s danged inconvenient. And did NOT start till I updated to 3.2.1

I’d really appreciate it if some very smart person would just take a look???

I am inserting code I get from the share in Flickr. But if we try to insert from Picasso, we get a different bizarre behavior. When I lift a URL from my own images file, things seem to work – I get a line break and a cursor, but I still get the nonbreaking line code – until I actually type on the line. When I type, the nonbreaking line code disappears.

If it’s a theme not developed for WordPress, your last question may be outside the per-vu of this forum. Time to break out the Google and start researching.

I would assume that making a child and over-riding the CSS or commenting out something in another file would do it. I haven’t looked carefully at this theme yet, but I’ve done similar things with twenty ten.

Okay. I can see I was preaching to the choir – of course, you knew all that. But I thought it might be nice to explain more fully in case somebody is reading this – and didn’t understand. I need these forums and learn from them – and so I feel like it’s important to explain to somebody who knows even less than I do about coding – so that they can learn, too. I didn’t mean to assume you didn’t have that knowledge yourself. Because obviously, you do. And I appreciate your help very much.