Bill

Your best bet is to ask about this on the support forum for the theme. They should be able to help you out. Good luck!

Sorry you’re having such a run around with this. I know it’s frustrating.

I hope this helps clarify what you’re seeing. You have self-hosted WP sites, which means they exist on the server of your paid web hosting account. WP.COM has nothing to do with those sites except that if you have a .com account, it will track your stats and provide convenient links to certain admin pages for those external sites. At WP.com, you have your own login credentials for that .com site. In general, support there doesn’t apply to your sites because they operate differently.

YET even while it was telling me that my site did not exist at WP.com, I was able to access my WordPress.com account without a password, see the stats on the sites (which it had just told me didn’t exist), change my password, everything except access the WP Admin to be able to edit and update my site/s

WP.com is aware of your sites if you link them there, but they don’t exist there on their servers. You probably changed your .com password.

Here at WP.ORG, the support site for self-hosted WP sites such as yours, you will have (possibly/hopefully) different login credentials. (At least the password should be different.) Further, those credentials are not the same as your logins for your individual sites.

Now regarding your main problem, clear your browser cache and cookies, make sure you’re using the right password for your site, and try again. If that still doesn’t get you in, look at this page which has very detailed options for resetting a password. There are different ways to go about it so look them over, with particular attention to the FTP method if that suits you. I hope this helps you get it sorted, but post again if you need to. Good luck!

I’m very sorry you’re having trouble with this. I’m afraid, though, that we can’t support commercial plugins here, just the ones in the WordPress repository. We don’t have access to the commercial ones. And presumably support should be included in the price you pay for a paid product. I would keep after them (and give them a little time, hard as it is). Also look into any channel provided by the third-party store that sold it, if it wasn’t a direct sale by the developers to you.

If you’re having trouble with parts of WP that are not related to this plugin, try disabling the plugin to see if it clears up. You might also activate only this plugin and disable all others to see if there might be some conflict going on between any of them. If it clears up, start re-activating them one at a time until it breaks again. Then you’ll have something to go on.

Wish I could be more helpful.

…per the instructions to limit who could sign into the account

Where did those instructions come from? Hopefully not from the sites you mentioned above. Did you edit .htaccess after the notice you received?

I wouldn’t think it would hamper backups being generated by your web host. It’s a simple matter, though, to log in to your hosting account and use cPanel (or similar) to instantly download backups of your site and database. In some hosting accounts, it’s just a few clicks.

Try asking about this on the support forum for the plugin. They will know best.

If you disable the plugin and WP functions normally (minus the things added by the plugin, of course), it’s most likely the plugin. See what they have to say and let us know.

It’s actually ‘sparkle’, not as above.