URGENT – Sliders no longer showing slides
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I have just noticed that all Meta Sliders created before mid-March are no longer displaying on posts. The sliders are all present in the Meta Slider tab but when I view any slider’s details the slides/images previously added are no longer ‘attached’ or showing. The site has been successfully using the plugin for a few years now without previous problems.
The site is a news website that adds many new posts a day and the editor did not have cause to look at some old posts until yesterday, when it was noticed the sliders have disappeared from old posts. New sliders added since mid-March are all OK.
All the posts still have the shortcodes and I have checked the WP database and all references in wp_posts and wp_postmeta to Meta Slider images etc on all the old posts are still present.
I have checked your ‘Top 5’ fixes and these do not solve the problem.
I updated the plugin to v3.5 a few days after its release in mid-March. Too much of a coincidence?
An example of a post with a ‘missing’ slider is here.
The site has over 700 Meta Sliders set up so this is rather urgent. Thanks in advance.
Here’s the wp_posts database for that post above.
(13137, 1, '2014-03-10 10:01:47', '2014-03-10 10:01:47', '', 'pancake-race-1', '', 'inherit', 'open', 'closed', '', 'pancake-race-1', '', '', '2014-03-10 10:01:47', '2014-03-10 10:01:47', '', 0, 'http://www.henleyherald.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/pancake-race-1.jpg', 11, 'attachment', 'image/jpeg', 0), (13138, 1, '2014-03-10 10:01:51', '2014-03-10 10:01:51', '', 'pancake-race-2', '', 'inherit', 'open', 'closed', '', 'pancake-race-2', '', '', '2014-03-10 10:01:51', '2014-03-10 10:01:51', '', 0, 'http://www.henleyherald.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/pancake-race-2.jpg', 13, 'attachment', 'image/jpeg', 0), (13178, 1, '2014-03-10 10:32:08', '2014-03-10 10:32:08', '', 'Pancake Race 2014', '', 'publish', 'open', 'closed', '', 'new-slider-9', '', '', '2014-03-10 10:34:50', '2014-03-10 10:34:50', '', 0, 'http://www.henleyherald.com/?post_type=ml-slider&p=13178', 0, 'ml-slider', '', 0), (13179, 1, '2014-03-10 10:52:10', '2014-03-10 10:52:10', '[metaslider id=13178]\r\n\r\nLots of fun was had on Saturday morning by the teams who entered the Mayor\'s Pancake Race ..... The crowds were entered by lots of flipping and dropping of pancakes.', 'publish', 'open', 'closed', '', 'fun-in-the-sun-at-mayors-pancake-race', '', '', '2014-03-10 10:52:10', '2014-03-10 10:52:10', '', 0, 'http://www.henleyherald.com/?p=13179', 0, 'post', '', 0),
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Hi Zimbo,
In 3.4 the query that extracts the slides was updated to include both attachments (how slides were stored pre 3.5) and the ‘ml-slide’ post type (how slides are stored post 3.5) – there’s more details in the changelog. We updated the query in 3.4, then waited a long time before releasing 3.5 to try and catch these sort of issues before we started storing slides in the new format in 3.5.
I suspect you have a plugin installed – maybe one which restricts certain post types to certain users (or something similar) – which is altering the updated query. Please try deactivating all plugins and see if the slides re-appear. One plugin we know that can cause this is “WP Sentry”, and it requires an update from the plugin author to make it compatible.
You can also install the WP Rollback plugin and roll back to v3.3.7 and your slides will reappear.
Regards,
TomHi Zimbo,
Coming back to this.
If the new slides are working, and the old slides aren’t, then it seems like we should be able to convert the old slides to new slides and it should all be OK again.
I’ve written a quick plugin to convert pre-3.5 slides to the new format. I have tested it only quickly, so proceed with caution.
Please – on a staging site – try installing this plugin:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/m0ajw9r7vdq5t1d/ml-slider-convert.zip?dl=0
Then go to Meta Slider > Convert. You should see your slideshows listed with the option to convert them.
I still suspect this is a conflict with another plugin, but it seems like this should work around the actual issue. If you do find a conflicting plugin, and there is an easy way (an option or setting maybe) to stop it conflicting, then that would be a better option to take.
Regards,
TomHi Tom,
Thank you for your time and efforts but I am afraid this problem has turned out to be self-inflicted via the use a database cleaner plugin… 🙁
One of the items the cleaner removes is what it considers “unused terms” merely stating that ‘unused terms might belong to draft posts’. The plugin did not say that such unused terms might not actually be unused i.e. they could be used by plugins, such as yours. What the plugin did was to delete all the Meta Slider ids and associated links in wp_terms, wp_term_relationships and wp_term_taxonomy.
As I mentioned in the OP, we don’t often go back to old stories after they are posted hence did not realise the damage caused at the time. By the time we realised the slides had disappeared we did not have a recent enough backup that had the term data in it.
Thankfully all of the slider data in wp_posts and wp_postmeta is intact. I did find an old backup from over a year ago and I have today managed to rebuild by hand those three tables by copying in the old data. Amazingly it has worked and I now have the first 400 or so Sliders complete again with their slides showing. But that still leaves about 250 sliders without the slides showing.
But I’ve figured out how to add a missing slider back by directly editing the database via phpMyAdmin.
– wp_terms is missing chunks of term_ids where the cleaner removed them and I can add the missing slider ids into the name and slug fields.
– Ditto wp_term_taxonomy, just fill in the missing term_taxonomy_ids & term_id plus ml-slider
– wp_term_relationships had the object_ids which I can get from wp_postmeta and cross-ref to term_taxonomy_idAm I missing any database fields? Is there anything you think I should be aware or careful about? Apart from taking a backup of course!
I’ve just got to figure out a way to automate the process of adding the missing 250 sliders now…
You might want to add some words to your plugin page about the issue of removing “unused terms” from a database when they are clearly anything but.
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