raabsalom

@bgoewert

I don’t remember exactly which theme I switched to, but all the themes I have installed are “twenty” ones, so it would have been one of those.

When I look at a published blog post that I haven’t edited since before this problem started, a list containing an Easy Footnotes footnote continues normally after the footnote:

But when I look at that post in the editor, now the list ends where the footnote had been. The footnote and the rest of the list are gone:

Now I’m thinking it looks like maybe the problem has something to do with the new way WordPress handles lists, which I think was changed a few months ago.

Looking at the revision history of a blog post that I have edited since this problem started, I see the code has automatically changed to include things like <!– wp:list-item –> during the same edit where the part of a list after a footnote got automatically deleted.

I made a new test blog post to experiment with, and I couldn’t reproduce the truncated list problem there. Could that be because this new post had the new list formatting from the start, and the bug only happens when it’s converting from the old list formatting?

I went into the code editor to try to test that idea, but when I changed the list in the test post to the old formatting, it automatically changed it right back.

So I’m thinking on other posts where I haven’t saved an edit since before this problem started, the full list must be there in the database, but when you open it in the editor, it automatically updates the code for lists, which apparently conflicts with the footnote shortcodes somehow, and leads to some list content disappearing from the HTML that the editor is working with.

If something like that is what’s going on, then it really is a bug in WordPress, isn’t it? Or rather a bug in the editor… Should I report it as a Gutenberg bug?

It looks like any new lists I make will probably be safe from this bug, but I’d like to see if anyone can fix it so the editor can open those old posts with all the content intact, so I won’t have to try to fix all those posts manually before I can safely continue editing them.

I couldn’t get that troubleshooting plugin to work (“We were unable to copy the plugin file required to enable the Troubleshooting Mode”), but I did try disabling all the plugins and switching themes, and the problem was still there.