2.8 upgrade killed visual editor

Those who still have this problem, follow johnkgibson’s lead.

Save yourselves a lot of time and just get Dean’s FCKeditor – https://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/fckeditor-for-wordpress-plugin/

I tried many of the suggestions in the forum and none of it worked. I tried a few other editor plugins; no luck. Then I downloaded CKeditor to my Mac, unzipped, ftp’d to the plugin folder, refreshed and I now have a visual editor on both Mac and PC browsers. Problem solved in minutes and no more messing with the code.

This whole thing was more than a little annoying and I hope this saves someone else the frustration that many of us have experienced.

Thanks for JohnkGibson!

this is cracking me up. i am ready to go batty and cause the next human being who talks to me physical harm.

my problem was completely different from everyone else’s. deactivating plugins did not work – even with them all deactivated, i had to uninstall them COMPLETELY to see any of my toggle buttons or my visual tab.

wordpress, seriously. fix this. this has been a huge waste of time and resources.

I can’t believe it. I have tried everything including adding the script to wp-config.php. Then I read a reply from someone that said “I went to my profile and clicked “Disable visual editor” and saved it, then went back in and enabled the visual editor and it worked” Well it worked for me too. Thanks everyone. JD

This is definitely not “RESOLVED.” As the above replies already make clear, the fixes only work for some people some of the time. So far, none have worked for me. So how is this resolved?

How are we to get our blogs working, and why hasn’t there been a bug fix in four months’ time?

Wanted to add my .02 since I just struggled with this for the last 3 hours… I’m sure this won’t help but a few people, maybe, but for me it was frustrating.

Scenario: newly installed WP 2.8 blog, fresh install, clean DB. Newly created subdomain on my main domain for testing purposes.

Problem: Icons wouldn’t show up on the visual editor. Editor was there, outlines of the buttons were there, buttons worked, but no icons on the buttons.

Example: https://labs.mycarefreepc.com/editor.jpg

Attempted Solutions after reading this post:
Installing TinyMCE Advanced – no go
Installing FCKEditor – no go
Disabling all plugins – no go
Disabling all themes – no go
Adding define(‘CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS’, false); to wp-config.php – no go
Adding ‘en’ inside WPLANG – no go

At this point I was highly confused. I went to a different domain, separate hosting account, plan, etc. When I did this on a different domain, everything worked. Only difference between the 2 accounts? Hotlink protection.

Solution (if you use hotlink protection):
Ensure your domain and/or subdomains are added to the allowed list

For me I added “labs.mycarefreepc.com” allowed.. I have to figure this was an extremely limited circumstance because of my configuration but for those who say it doesn’t work and they have tried everything listed here, you “might” want to give this a shot.

i’ve been living with button-less visual editor ever since 2.8.x upgrade, was hoping that by upgrading to wp2.9 would solve the problem.

but it didnt. even after editing wp-config.php and trying everything else on this thread. duhrain’s solution worked. i added my subdomain to the allowed list, and all the icons appeared.

am feeling pretty defeated that it was the hotlink protection, but BOY AM I GLAD IT’S SOLVED. so you might want to try this if all else failed.

All of these fixes, I believe, are to symptoms and not the problem.

I’m using wordpress 2.9.1. The visual editor is not showing up in only 1 post; it works in all the rest.

I’ve scoured the post but nothing jumps out at me that is causing it.

I use TinyMCE Advanced, and disabling it didn’t work.
I cleared cache, added define( ‘CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS’, false );, re-uploaded wp-include and wp-admin, disabled google gears, nothing.

Another symptom: clicking “Screen Options” at the top of the page did nothing, which made me view the source. The last panel on my editor page is “post revisions” which is minimized, the end of the source code for this page is :

<div id="revisionsdiv" class="postbox " >
<div class="handlediv" title="Click to toggle"><br /></div><h3 class='hndle'><span>Post Revisions</span></h3>
<div class="inside">

So none of the javascript is getting loaded at the end of the file. I don’t know why this is, I’m not familiar with wordpres enough to know what is represented by the “inside” class or what gets loaded, but maybe this will help diagnose the error. This is for my dad’s site and he saves every 5 seconds, is it some sort of problem with how many revisions are loaded by the revision manager?

Ok, I can confirm this is a revision control bug. Let me explain.

Suspecting a bug in revisioning, I installed the “Revision Control” plugin bug didn’t activate it.

My dad is making a huge post, suddenly he loses the visual editor.

I activate revision control, limit the # of revisions to 10.

I go to edit the post, still no visual editor.

I save the post using the visual editor that shows just html, it takes FOREVER.

When it comes back, I have the visual editor back correctly. I suspect when I hit save, revision control was activated and it wiped out all but the last 10 revisions.

The whole bug overall is something interrupts the page load which prevents the javascripts to be loaded at the end of the file; in my case, it was revision control. If you get this error, please view the source of the admin page and see where the page stops loading.

@surfrock66 – I’m having the exact same issue. It’s only one page that I’m having a problem with: in the Visual view it shows only the HTML and no visual buttons. When looking at the source view, the last line of code is the beginning of the page revisions.

I’ve tried all the fixes in this 3 page spread with no success.

I’m glad I was able to help. Sorry, I was not back before this.

I will say (and I hope to not put a jinx on it), but the auto-upgrades from within WordPress now seem to work much better.

Roz Fruchtman
@SayItWithEcards on Twitter

After disabling all of my plugins, the visual editor works. Then I activated them one by one and finally found the one that caused the conflict. Weird thing is that the plugin works on all of my other blogs. I don’t see any patterns as to what is causing this problem.