Publish and Preview controls have disappeared — HELP!

Without my knowingly changing anything at all in the installation, suddenly the “Publish” and “Preview” buttons are gone from my edit page. I cannot discover any way to publish posts, so until this is resolved, my blog is absolutely dead in the water.

I searched previous comments in support and discovered that there are others to whom this has happened. One such comment suggested that I disable all my plugins and try again. I did this. It did not work. Now, not only can I not publish posts on my blog, but I also cannot get my wpstats plugin to work anymore. When I try to activate it again and it warns me that I need to apply my API key, I press the link on the warning … and I’m not told where to apply the API key.

(“I have not changed anything” is not entirely correct. I manually edited wp-config.php because after the 2.8.6 upgrade, my httpd/error_log was bloating into the gigabyte range with warnings that I was *required* to use date.timezone or date_default_timezone_set() to resolve time zone within php scripts, from a dozen places within the WordPress installation. I added the following line to wp-config.php:

date_default_timezone_set(‘America/New_York’);)

Will somebody please suggest what I might do to get back my ability to publish my own articles on my own blog?

Thanks.

Phil W.