3.2.1 Visual Editor broken PERSONAL TOPIC

Okay. We’re exhausted. Ipstenu – I was wrong about the updating. I never did update THIS blog. I’d updated two others successfully. But I’d never tried to do this one. As it turns out, the others would have been find from the beginning. The problem that started with my first upgrade to 3.1 NEVER went away. I just never tried with this blog.

We have gone through the 500 lines of the old database. As I say, many of the lines were too software specific for us to be able to assess the info. So we started taking entries one at a time, looking for essential ones, and porting them into the new data base. On the way, we DID find calls to old plug-ins, like self-feeding blog roll, which had never actually been used. We did NOT port those.

As I said, we found that the problem happened when we exported the old the wp-options table and imported it into the new database. But there were SO MANY lines in it, we couldn’t analyze each line.

We managed to get almost 100 % of my data – entries, settings, links, etc. – without breaking the editor. I am back on line with it. I had to re-populate my twentyten menu, which was not a big deal. And some general settings. Not terrible things.

My conclusion is this: the problem was in the database, in the wp-options. But this blog has been up since 2007. Over that period of time, the basic theme was hacked, other themes auditioned, twentyten tried and hacked, plug-ins were tried, much content generated. I am absolutely SURE that some artifact from all those years must have lingered in the database, and the update to 3 had a conflict with that.

We haven’t found the line, but I’m sure it’s specific to this blog and not a problem with the WP code. Perhaps with 3.1 the code became more sensitive – and so my own site and others like it found themselves with this problem, perhaps caused by any number of tiny database lines conflicting with a stronger, more particular version of the program code. Thus, the proliferation of suggestions for a cure – some working for others, most not.

The only thing I can recommend to others is a quiet, slow, systematic testing of each component of their coding. Ultimately, every blog needs to be backed up regularly – and a totally clean install, generating a new, clean database – then an import – may be the only way of allowing WordPress to operate as it should.

Not much help, I know. But after two days, that is what we learned.

I haven’t closed this because I’m not finished. IN the course of setting up my new blog(s), I managed to dump my NewMoonFarm blog entirely. I still can’t remember tossing that file – but the point is, the database was still intact. So yesterday, I installed a brand new download of WP manually and connected it to the old database. Which worked beautifully, once I figured out the secret keys biz.

When I got into the dash and found all my posts preserved, I was dancing. THEN I WENT TO THE EDITOR. And the SAME problem hit me: again, no VISUAL editor. Copy in that datafield was, at first, the usual gray, but all html. After a few minutes’ working with it, the font went to white. Just the problem I had upgrading kstreetjournal from – and now I can’t remember – was it 2.8? in the first place. The only fix that worked was going back to the old version. And the problem I just dealt with again, setting up my kstreetjournal blog with an upgrade from that old version to 3.2.1.

As outlined above, in the Kstreetjournal case, we isolated the problem to the wp-options MySQL file. So we replaced it with a fresh one. I had to rebuild the options, and did so by manually importing settings, carefully copying them one line at a time into the new database wp-options. In doing this, we circumvented whatever was in the rest of that file that was conflicting with TinyMCE.

Armed with that, I replaced the same part of the old NewMoonFarm MySQL wp-options with fresher version. Actually, I have to admit that I exported the kstreetjournal MySQL options bit and imported it into NewMoon. Which, of course, taught me a number of things. I re-wrote the basic stuff – the blog name and URL – and was pleased to have everything else just pretty much the way I wanted it.

SO – for me, this is TWICE that the VISUAL EDITOR problem has been solved by replacing an older wp-options section of my database. The interesting thing here is that NewMoon was already running 3.1 – And I’m pretty sure that I had checked the editor, finding no problem with it. So why would that problem show up suddenly when I applied the old database to 3.2.1???

My messing here isn’t methodical enough to draw intelligent conclusions. I mean, the visual editor MIGHT have been working fine – or maybe I just thought it was. I am useless. But again – whatever – changing the options database solved the problem.

You know, pig – I remembered that you’d posted something about that in the middle of all this chaos. And then I never did look. But the second time, I didn’t use an installer. I just moved the files by hand.