Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

I came across an odd problem just the other day that caused the visual editor to go haywire on a brand new WordPress installation.

Whenever I tried to write a post, the visual editor would load, but then the buttons would disappear. On top of that, none of the text I typed would show up either. A “select all” showed that my text did in fact exist, but it was displayed as white text on the visual editor’s white background. Stranger still, the HTML editor worked just fine.

I tried working through all sorts of solutions offered up online including a reinstall of WordPress, troubleshooting plugins, and even checking file permissions on the wp-includes and wp-admin directories.

None of these solutions worked, but as I dug through the blog’s admin pages, I saw something strange. As you can see in the picture below (click to enlarge), the WordPress and Site Address fields both show a colon appended to the URL. The problem is a strange result of how WordPress was installed as well as how the web host has configured our account. Removing the colons fixed the problem immediately, and will likely remedy your issues as well.

As a final note, this fix works on WordPress 3.2.1 but should apply to any past or future releases of the software.

The WP Stats plugin on my blog has not been working for some time, so I have relied on StatPress for my site visit statistics. I really like StatPress, but today it started bugging me that WP Stats was not recording any visits whatsoever. I know that my API key is correct, as it works just fine for Askimet, so I figured something else was wrong.

After minimal digging in the WordPress forums, I found that there was an essential component missing from my theme’s footer.php file. Right before the ending </body> tag in your footer.php file, you will need to enter the following:

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

This triggers WP Stats to pick up the visits and record them properly.

That’s all there is to it. A very quick fix for quite an annoying problem!