WordPress Stuck in HTML Edit Mode

August 25, 2008

Written by Karen D. Swim

I have an update to my issues with the WordPress 2.6.1 fiasco and wanted to share the solution with you. After reversing my attempted upgrade, my WP Admin dashboard still had issues. Two of the most troubling were:

Inability to edit publish date (I could save as draft or publish immediately)
Visual editor did not work. Visual was highlighted but it was stuck in HTML mode

After doing some online surfing I was able to determine that the visual editor issue is not new and can be traced to the TinyMCE file.

I found jerrydrussell’s forum answer helpful:

edit /wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php find the line that says ‘compress’ => true and change to ‘compress’ => false.

I found my answer in the WordPress forum. There are a series of helpful steps to help you diagnose and fix the problem. Fortunately, I did not have to go through all the steps because I had my old tinymce file. I was smart to backup before attempting the upgrade. I actually did two backups to two separate locations. Now that I knew the problem file, I went to the folder on my server labeled wp-content/includes/js/tinymce and deleted the entire tinymce folder. I then uploaded my original tinymce folder and my visual editor is now working! So I can once again post images without coding or using a workaround. If you are not comfortable using FTP or working on your server, have someone do it for you.

I still cannot edit the post date so I’m off to work on that issue next. The moral of this story is back up your files before doing anything! If you screw something up you can restore yourself to ground zero.

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Posted by Karen Swim | Filed Under Insights

Comments

8 Responses to “WordPress Stuck in HTML Edit Mode”

Lillie Ammann on August 26th, 2008 12:03 am

I’m glad you’ve got that problem solved. Good luck on the date issue. Backing up is so important. One thing I learned when I had a problem upgrading WordPress a while back is to back up the database in the Web site control panel as well as WordPress. I had to get my Web host to restore a databse when an upgrade went bad some time ago. Now I backup both the SQL database and WordPress.

Reply
Karen Swim on August 26th, 2008 7:39 am

Lillie, thanks for the sharing the tip about backing up the SQL database! I hope this spares others from upgrade disasters.

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TIna on September 1st, 2008 3:22 pm

Woww, thank you so much Karen, I will try it.

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Karen Swim on September 1st, 2008 8:00 pm

Hi Tina, I hope it works for you too!

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Steven Goh on September 2nd, 2008 12:15 pm

Just out of curiosity, do you have the following plugins? I had to deactivate the following plugins for my visual editor to work. They are:

CounterizeII 2.1.4.1
Deedburner Fedsmith 2.3.1
Google XML Sitemaps 3.1.0.1
Subscribe2 4.9
Subscribe2 Debug 4.9
Subscribe2 Uninstaller 4.9

Right now, my visual editor is working well. However, when ever I activate any one of these plugins, It goes back to Html Editor instead of Visual Editor.

Steven Gohs last blog post..Wordpress: Visual Editor did not show

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Karen Swim on September 2nd, 2008 12:23 pm

Steven, I did not have any of those plug-ins. Have you tried the solution I used? The root does appear to be in the tinymce file since that holds the visual editor. I’d love to hear how it works out for you.

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F. S. KAMAL on September 13th, 2008 5:15 am

My problem is the oppsite of what’s described above. My editor is stuck in visual mode and I can’t switch to html model. Any clues please?

F. S. KAMALs last blog post..Panasonic Lumix G1

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Allahverdi on November 30th, 2008 10:59 am

Hello. i had that problem too. But i solved it. I wrote a blog post, how i did it: http://creative-boy.com/2008/11/stuck-on-html-editor-on-wordpress/

It is a bit different. Don’t need to change compress

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