Visual Editor Gone after 3.8.1 Upgrade

Have you tried re-uploading all files & folders – except the wp-content folder and wp-config.php & root .htaccess files – from a fresh download of WordPress. Make sure that you delete the old copies of files & folder before uploading the new ones.

@esmi – I just tried that… and it didn’t solve the problem. FWIW, here’s the page source:

https://pastebin.com/bcuT0t9v

Any idea if I could just roll back the files to pre-update? Will that cause conflicts with the database now?

Will that cause conflicts with the database now?

It could do. Do you have a pre-upgrade database backup?

@esmi – I can get my hosting company to roll back the database if I need to. I guess that’s what I’ll do since there doesn’t seem to be any solution to this. There’s two or three pages of results when you search the forum for “3.8.1 editor”–and no definite resolution to this issue.

Millions of people are using WordPress 3.8.1 without any problems, so this issue is site specific.

@esmi – Yeah, absolutely. Only a small subset of people seem to be having this issue. I just wish I could figure out what we all have in common. I’m going to monkey around with it more before giving up and downgrading. My hunch is that there’s something going on with caching

Do you know if your hosts are running a web cache? On some hosting environments, aggressive settings for the “mod_pagespeed” addon can break the javascript code and cause scripts to not be able to function. This can cause many problems, such as widgets not working, menus not being draggable, the customizer not working, or the media screens not being available.

To fix the issue, you will need to disable mod_pagespeed, or adjust its settings to not take effect in the wp-admin directories. You may need to ask your hosting service for help on how to do this.

@esmi – Thanks again for all the advice. The problem is corrected now. I tried so many things in quick succession that I really can’t say definitively what fixed it, but I think it probably was the result of some aggressive browser cache clearing. I’m thinking there must have been some cached file/code from the previous visual editor version lingering around.

+1 on the observation that aggressive browser cache clearing helps. That is what seems to have done it for me, though of course I’d reuploaded the wp-includes folder prior to clearing the cache, so maybe that helped too.

Ooops, apparently not. It worked once, then it stopped working again. Argh.

For me the following worked fine:

I installed the WordPress Helpers plugin.

In the “Writing” tab I changed “Editor” to “Only show Text editor” and “Set Default Editor” to “HTML” and pressed “Save Changes”.

Immedately after that I changed “Editor” to “Show Visual and Text editors” and “Set Default Editor” to “Visual” and pressed “Save Changes” again.

Now the visual editor is just doing fine again.