Can't publish or trash ANY posts!

  • Hi,

    Just this afternoon, for no reason that we can find, we suddenly found that we couldn’t publish or trash ANY of our posts.

    When we click “Publish” in Edit or Quick Edit, or we change the status to “Published”, I don’t get any error messages in the server apache logs or in the javascript console, it just doesn’t take effect. Likewise, if I try to trash the post, it doesn’t take any effect. The post reappears as the same status.

    I can edit the title through Quick Edit, and I can change the content in full edit mode if I click “save draft”, I can even change the status between Pending Review and Draft – but I can’t Publish or trash the post.

    This affects existing posts which are pending review or draft, and new test posts that I created in order to test this. It was reported by one of our editors, but it also affects me – and I’m the Administrator of the blog, so it shouldn’t be anything to do with user permissions.

    I’ve tried deactivating all plugins, it didn’t help. We haven’t installed any new plugins or changed any settings (I’m the only Administrator, and I haven’t logged onto it in days until this afternoon)

    I’ve tried rebooting the server, still nothing.

    Help!

    Thanks,

    Al

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Hi itrigga,

    If you haven’t already, I recommend trying from:
    1. Different Browsers
    2. Different Computers with different browsers

    It may be a browser plugin that is causing the problem.

    Thread Starter itrigga

    (@itrigga)

    Hi ce_kevinw,

    Thanks – but that was the first thing we tried. I’ve tried it on Chrome & Firefox on Windows 7, and Chrome and Opera on Ubuntu 10.04.

    It’s very strange

    Al

    Hi itrigga,

    I’m just thinking outloud now, things I would test.

    The problem is that something as changed, and this changed caused loss of functionality.

    Was it a file that changed?
    Your WordPress files generally don’t change. I’d take a look at the core WordPress files on your account, check the timestamps of when last edited, and see if there is anything interesting there.

    Was it a post that somehow caused the issue?
    If you know the date the issue began to occur, you may want to delete all posts prior to that to see if that is the problem. I would copy the site to a dev server (or just a separate folder) so you don’t mess anything up.

    Thanks – but that was the first thing we tried. I’ve tried it on Chrome & Firefox on Windows 7, and Chrome and Opera on Ubuntu 10.04.

    I know in Firefox that javascript errors are not very obvious, but in Internet Explorer they’re indicated by a yellow triangle. Have you tested in Internet Explorer?

    I don’t get any error messages in the server apache logs or in the javascript console, it just doesn’t take effect.

    To confirm, did you check for any error_log files in your WordPress directory? Sometimes errors are logged there. Each folder can have an error_log file, so you may need to dig around to find it.

    Thread Starter itrigga

    (@itrigga)

    Hi,

    Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate it. Clearly something must have changed, but it’s proving very difficult to find out what it is…

    The issue started about 4pm (London time) this afternoon. When I search in the wordpress directory for files modified in the last 24hrs, I just get the uploads directory for September – which is empty:

    > find . -mtime -1 -print
./wp-content/uploads/2011
./wp-content/uploads/2011/09

>ls -larth ./wp-content/uploads/2011/09/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 4 www-data www-data 24 2011-09-01 08:35 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 www-data www-data  6 2011-09-01 08:35 .

    So no wordpress files have been modified recently. Also, I have no error_log files in there. The Apache error log shows nothing relevant, just 404s from the browser requesting a favicon.

    It’s not a Javascript problem, the Chrome JS console is good at detecting those and acting like a debugger, and it shows nothing. None of our writers or editors use Internet Explorer.

    There’s not much to go on, I know…

    However, I have found that I *can* publish a really old test post, from a few months back. I just can’t publish anything from this afternoon onwards – and yet there’s no visible difference between those posts.

    I did notice a strange thing when it first started happening – I got a message saying that I couldn’t edit a post because another editor was already editing it, although she definitely wasn’t (she logged out and closed all her browser windows to make sure).

    Thanks for your help,

    Al

    Thread Starter itrigga

    (@itrigga)

    Ah-hah!

    I think I’ve fixed it, by logging onto the MySQL console and running
    repair table xyz for each table in the WP database.

    It didn’t show any problems, but since running that, I can now publish the posts that I previously couldn’t.

    Note that I had previously run the command-line myisamchk utility, and that didn’t fix it, I had to manually do a repair table.

    Thanks a lot for your suggestions, and hopefully this will help anyone else with the same problem.

    Al

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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