To answer some of the questions asked here:
* If you deactivate, your settings will still be saved.
* If you uninstall through the WP Admin interface, they will be removed.
* If you uninstall by deleting the directory through FTP, your settings will remain.
If you want to use the WP Admin uninstall & re-install, but want to keep your settings: use phpMyAdmin to export the rows starting with “wpseo_” from the options table in your database. After uninstalling, these rows will be gone and you can import them again through phpMyAdmin to get your settings back.
The most likely cause of the menu not showing up is an error preventing the PHP script from finishing. Yoast’s menu items normally appear quite low on the list and an error before that bit is printed to the screen could prevent them from ever being printed.
Could you tell me what – if any – error you see in your error log ? or on the screen/in the page source if you have WP_DEBUG enabled ?
If you are currently not logging PHP errors, have a look at this code which you can add to your wp-config.php file.
It will log any and all php errors to a file, independently of whether you have WP_DEBUG set to true. That way you can keep track of PHP issues on a live website.
I’d be very interested to hear if any errors relating to this issue show up in the log.
Be aware: logging errors will generally scare the living daylights out of most people as they suddenly start realising how many plugins are throwing errors….
Hope this helps!
Smile,
Juliette