Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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I fixed my WordPress 2.8 Visual editor problem – sorta

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Seriously … I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to fix the problem I’ve been having with the new WordPress 2.8 on 7 of my blogs! As I said in my last post the visual editor wasn’t working, and since I tend to post pictures in many of my posts (and always on my photoblog) that was a BIG problem!

I spent so much time searching on the web and reading posts and the WordPress.org forum trying to figure out a fix for this problem that I think it caused a delay in my posting new posts on my blogs over the last few days. I was seriously determined to fix my blogs.

So do you want to know how I fixed my blogs visual editor problem? I discovered that during the automatic upgrade WordPress didn’t upload some of the necessary files in the wp_includes/js/tinymce folder! I found the answer to my quest in the WordPress.org forums near the bottom of this page.

My WordPress install on all of my Feverishthoughts.com blogs were missing the following files in the wp_includes/js/tinymce folder:

wp-tinymce.js
wp-tinymce.js.gz
wp-tinymce.php

I downloaded a fresh copy of WordPress 2.8, unzipped the files, and then used my FTP program to navigate to the wp_includes/js/tinymce for each of the affected blogs.

I then deleted the FILES – (not folders) in the tinymce folder and uploaded the tinymce files from my copy of WordPress 2.8. This got rid of old files that were no longer being used by this WP upgrade and added the three extremely necessary new files (listed above).

I actually did this for all of my blogs (17) in order to get rid of the old files that are no longer being used.

Once I was done adding the files that weren’t included in the automatic upgrade I cleared my browsers cache, and restarted my browser. Once I logged back into my WordPress sites I found that the Visual editor almost always loads. When it doesn’t I just do a CTRL- refresh (for a hard refresh) and it loads.

So now I can once again upload or add photos to my blog posts, alter their size if necessary and add tags to my posts! Yeah!

I think the reason why I ran into this problem was that I had upgraded from 2.33 to 2.62 using the WordPress Upgrade plugin (this was many many months ago) and then when 2.7 came out I used the plug to do the upgrade and finally used the WP automatic upgrade to update my Feverishthoughts blogs to 2.8. Neither the plugin or the built in automatic upgrade seem to delete old files and in the case of the 2.8 upgrade it missed a few very important files!

All the rest of my blogs worked fine. I had updated them using Fantastico in my C-panel.

So the moral of the story … maybe wait about a month before upgrading your WordPress installation when a new version comes out as this will give them some time to discover and hopefully fix the bugs. And two – if you are having a problem with your WP installation, back everything up and then read the instructions on how to do a proper manual install. That will probably fix the most major problems.





Anyone else having trouble with WordPress 2.8?

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For the first time ever, I updated to the newest version of WordPress on the day that it came out. I believe that was June 11th. I spent that day upgrading all my blogs – all 17 of them!

Most of the installations went well, but I’m having trouble with my blogs on Feverishthoughts.com. The visual editor doesn’t work. Normally this wouldn’t bother me all that much since I do most of my writing in the plain text HTML mode, but if you want to add a picture via the “add an image” tab it doesn’t work. I click on the tab and nothing happens.

Same goes for adding post tags. I have to add tags for my posts by saving the post as a draft, then going to the Post section and doing a quick edit to add the tags.

I tend to upload most of my pictures to my Flickr account and then use the Flickr code to add them to my posts, however without being able to use “visual mode” I can’t re-size my images if they need an adjustment.

The two blogs that suffer the most from my lack of ability to use visual mode and add pictures are my photo blog (naturally!) and my gardening blog. I have tons of new photos of the flowers that are blooming in my garden and I can’t post them! How frustrating!

It sounds like the current beta version of WordPress 2.8.1 will address these issues, but given my experience I think I’ll hold off downloading the beta version for now.

Oh and it’s not a plugin conflict. Even with all my plugins deactivated I still can’t use the visual editor. I’ve also cleared my browser cache and tried re-installing wordpress (automatically) and that didn’t help either.

I think I’ll try manually upgrading one of my blogs and see if that helps. Maybe some of the files were corrupted when I used the automatic upgrade.

Anyone else having similar problems with WordPress?

Next time I’ll wait a couple of weeks before upgrading after a new version comes out.

Anyone having problems with Hostgator lately?

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I’m having hosting problems again. If you’re a regular visitor to this site you’ve probably noticed that at times my blog (and all the other blogs I write) load really slow and sometimes you’ll see error messages scattered throughout the page as well.

I’ve also had problems with my Wp-posts databases crashing and needing repair too. Plus I often can’t edit old posts and get error messages when I try. Nor can I always post when I want to because of server slowness or errors. I’m just about at my wits end.

This started happening near the end of March. I think the reason my sites are having trouble is because HostGator upgraded their MySql to PHP 5.1 and it’s causing all the errors and slow load times.

Anyone else on HostGator experiencing problems in the last month or so? I’m sure there’s a few, as I’ve noticed some of the blogs I visit regularly loading really really slowly lately when they didn’t have problems in the past.

If they don’t fix the problem soon ie go back to a trouble free version of PHP I may be forced to look for a new host. I hate that idea! I’ve loved Hostgator since I started with them in 2007 after a terrible experience with Lunarpages.

Any suggestions? I have over 20 websites and blogs now with more on the way so I need a very good shared hosting package from a company that doesn’t overcrowded/oversell their servers or else move up to VPS hosting.

Speaking of Lunarpages … I finally transferred some of my old domains from their service in April. I didn’t have a hosting account with them any longer, but when I left I let them continue to handle my domains registration … bad move as this meant I had to deal with support several times each year begging them to renew my domains. Believe me, their support people need support and sales training in a big way! Anyway … my domains are now with GoDaddy … but get this … Lunarpages sent me a renewal notice today for one of my domains that they no longer control! So I’m still stuck dealing with their support trying to tell them that I really don’t have anything to do with them anymore! Arghhhh! Frustrating! They’d better not try to bill me!

So again, if you have any good hosting suggestions I’d love to hear about it, plus if you have any hosting horror stories feel free to pass that on too. LOL

WP_Posts database crashed – HELP!

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I need some help fixing my husbands blog – Guitar Licks. Today when he visited the site (while I was still sleeping) the blog had error messages stating that the WP_posts database had crashed.

When you visit his site it loads with the WP theme and sidebars, but there’s error messages at the top and a “post cannot be found” message where current posts should be listed on the index page.

Some of the errors state:

ALTER TABLE wp_posts ADD FULLTEXT `yarpp_title` ( `post_title`)

ALTER TABLE wp_posts ADD FULLTEXT `yarpp_content` ( `post_content`)

So I’m assuming this error has something to do with the Yet another related post plugin that I’m using on most of my blogs. This blog is using the plugin version 2.16 and is using WP 2.62.

In the Yet another related posts plugin admin area there was a message that said:

YARPP’s “consider titles” and “consider bodies” relatedness criteria require your wp_posts table to use the MyISAM storage engine, but the table seems to be using the engine. These two options have been disabled.
To restore these features, please update your wp_posts table by executing the following SQL directive: ALTER TABLE `wp_posts` ENGINE = MyISAM; . No data will be erased by altering the table’s engine, although there are performance implications.
If, despite this check, you are sure that wp_posts is using the MyISAM engine, press this magic button:

I clicked on the “magic button” as the plugin seems to be working just fine in all of my other blogs and I ended up with even more errors!

Help!

I’ve looked at the WP database for this blog and the WP_posts table says “in use” and I can’t browse it. I also can’t use the backup plugin in Guitar licks – it’s there and functioning but just hung when I tried to do a back up.

I’ve backed up the whole database using PHPmyAdmin so I have a copy in case something goes terribley wrong. Now I just need to know how to fix it.

Should I just place a check mark on WP_posts and then click the repair function at the bottom of the structure screen in PHPmyAdmin and see if that repairs the problem?

I’m nervous about attempting to fix this as I’ve never had to try to repair a database error before. Any help would be appreciated.

I thought I lost my WordPress Database just now! Scary!

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A few minutes ago as I finished the post below and pressed the Publish button this is what my admin area looked like:

Blog Admin Error After Posting
Blog Admin Error After Posting

Pretty scary, eh? I just about had a heart attack!

With the mantra “Oh no, oh no, oh no” going through my head, I opened up a new tab in my browser and loaded the site in the hopes that the blog would look normal. You know … that maybe what I saw in the admin area was just a temporary glitch?

No such luck … the front page of the blog looked like this:

Front page of my blog after publishing a post!
Front page of my blog after publishing a post!

After having another heart attack and aging 10 years (gotta get some wrinkle cream now!) I decided to go to my webhost and check C-panel to make sure that my database really hadn’t disappeared.

The database was still there and I could see that it still had comment and post data in it, so i decided to open another new tab in order to load my blog again. I got the same error messages all over the page, so I added wp-admin to the url and I was able to go directly to the admin area.

Much to my relief the admin area looked fine when I got into it. I use a wp-cache for this blog so I went to the settings area and cleared the whole cache for the blog and it looked normal again.

I have no idea what happened, but it sure scared me! This is my oldest and biggest blog. The thought of losing the whole database and possibly the databases for my other blogs really freaked me out.

I just updated this blog to WP 2.6.2 on Saturday. Up until now there’s been no major problems except for the widget area looking strange on occasion. I wrote about that one one of my other blogs if you want to read about the widget problem. You can actually read about how fun it was to update 16 blogs in that post if you’re interested in hearing about my experiment with the WordPress Autoupdate plugin.

At least having just updated my blog I do have recent backups of the database and files.

So I don’t know if this was a problem caused by the new WP 2.6 or if perhaps there was an error on my hosts server when I was publishing my last post. I suppose it could also be a plugin conflict, but I haven’t added any new plugins or updated any since Saturday when I updated WordPress, and I’ve published several posts since then … so that doesn’t make sense as the cause of the problem.

I guess I’ll have to see what happens when I publish this post! Wish me luck!

Has anyone else had a problem like this immediately after publishing a new post? If you have experienced this type or error, did you ever find out what caused it? Any ideas?

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