No styling works, with any theme

  • Resolved HenrikRClausen

    (@henrikrclausen)


    7 years, 11 months ago

    Following clean-up after major hacking, I have a persistent problem with my site not applying any theming whatsoever. Live preview doesn’t work even for the standard WP themes, and switching to either old or new standard themes doesn’t give any styling, either.

    We used to have the commercial theme Proximity for the site, but that’s a bit to the complex side, and challenging to debug. As things stand, I would be happy to have Twenty Sixteen working, or anything, to develop new theming.

    Being a moderately experienceed WP admin, I did run a repair installation of WP (we’re running the latest), and a WordFence scan of all files on the site, to no avail.
    DOM Inspector shows that no styling is inherited, regardless of the theme I try out. A coursory glance at the source code shows that there is no invocation of the style.css file – which does look like quite a clue, but IÍ„Í„’m uncertain how to fix it in a proper way.

    Could it be that the site is still compromised, destroying the ability to use any themes?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
  • Joey

    (@leglesslizard)

    7 years, 11 months ago

    Hey,

    You actually get a “deceptive site ahead” warning in chrome when you try to visit the provided link currently.

    It looks to me like you still have caching enabled from somewhere. To test everything out deactivate all your plugins and switch to a default theme (twentyseventeen). Make sure all caching is off and then you’ll know exactly what is going on.

    Currently, a minified and cached css file is trying to be loaded by something but that file no longer exists and the styles loaded by the theme is pretty much empty.

    RossMitchell

    (@rossmitchell)

    7 years, 11 months ago

    Maybe it is still compromised, but I see other stuff such as minified files and cache that could easily be the problem.

    Suggest that you disable all plugins by renaming the “plugins” directory.
    DO anything else needed to disable the cache stuff.
    Lets make the site work before we try and make it fast.

    If this does not help then rename your theme directory “Proximity” to make the site fallback to the default theme.

    Thread Starter HenrikRClausen

    (@henrikrclausen)

    7 years, 11 months ago

    Thanks for the suggestions, guys 🙂

    I had already tried to disable all plugins, and retried it the more brutal way by renaming the ‘plugins’ directory. Nothing here.

    Also, i tried switching to other themes. They all behave pretty much the same way – but not entirely. I do get a heading picture with Proximity, so the themes have some effect. Apparently, key elements of the CSS are being negated somewhere. If I figure out where, I can fix this.

    Renaming the ‘Proximity’ directory just gives me a ‘directory not found’ message, not a fallback to a WP default theme. At the moment, I’d be happy to have any theme working.

    As for caching, we used to have that, but I disabled it a while ago, knowing that ‘stable’ precedes ‘fast’. It makes sense, though, to look for a remnant of caching files that breaks stuff still.

    The “Deceptive site ahead” warning would be due to us not having switched to SSL (https://) yet. That’s a task for a later day, when the site as such is working.

    I’ll tinker on. My next step is to replace all WP files with FTP, rather than just let WP reinstall itself. There would be some backing up to do, like of the wp-config file.

    Still puzzled, still learning…

    Thread Starter HenrikRClausen

    (@henrikrclausen)

    7 years, 11 months ago

    Updating with the latest (non-)findings:

    The caching we used was WP Total Cache, I found a folder from it. WPTC does have a minify option, which makes it a suspect. So I tried renaming those folders, re-installing the plugin, activating/detactivating it. All to no avail.

    Also, I replaced every one of the original WP files through FTP, still no luck.

    Essential parts of the theme CSS (every theme) is being disabled somewhere in the loading process. And I’m stumped. It must be discoverable somehow. Could it be hidden in the database rather than in the WP files on the web server?

    Joey

    (@leglesslizard)

    7 years, 11 months ago

    Looks good for me now 🙂 sorted it?

    Thread Starter HenrikRClausen

    (@henrikrclausen)

    7 years, 11 months ago

    My goodness, it works in Chrome!

    Still broken in Firefox. I’ll investigate that issue.

    Joey

    (@leglesslizard)

    7 years, 11 months ago

    Looks like a permissions issue on Firefox, I’d imagine with SSL sorted that’ll allow the stylesheets to load

    Thread Starter HenrikRClausen

    (@henrikrclausen)

    7 years, 11 months ago

    Could be. It happens in FF only on one of my devices, the site works on my Android tablet.

    I’ll assume that going SSL will help a lot, too.

    Thanks for the input – while I’m not quite sure what was wrong, at least I’m back on track now 🙂

    Thread Starter HenrikRClausen

    (@henrikrclausen)

    7 years, 11 months ago

    Am dipping my toes into SSL, using Let’s Encrypt. That was dead easy to set up on my hosting provider, but it looks like I’m not entirely where I need to be – FF gives a warning about “Mixed content”. I’ll figure out exactly what that means, and how to deal with it.

    And the site is still broken in FF on Linux, works elsewhere. Weird, but a lot better than yesterday 🙂

    Thread Starter HenrikRClausen

    (@henrikrclausen)

    7 years, 11 months ago

    Google webmaster tools pointed me to a folder of still-compromised files on the server.. That might be the cause for Firefox to handle the site with caution. Resolving..

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

The topic ‘No styling works, with any theme’ is closed to new replies.

Tags