smart computer use?

I recently logged into the Wordpress admin area of one of my web sites to edit one of the pages.

Something was different

Upon opening up the editor for the page, I noticed that the Wordpress visual editor, which is actually a TinyMCE editor was showing my page content in the HTML format, and not the visual format, even though the visual tab was selected. This was kinda strange as it seems usually Wordpress will default to the visual editor when loading new pages.

I then also noticed that there was no resizing pull-tab on the bottom right of the editor frame as usual, so I couldn’t resize the editor window… Then I also noticed that if I clicked on the HTML tab the editor would contract or expand much like the other optional sections below the editor if you were to click on their heading.

What was going on?

I wasn’t sure what was going on, really. At first I thought maybe something had been corrupted during my latest upgrade (to version 2.6.1 I think), but I wasn’t sure this could be the case as I had no issues with the upgrades on any of my other Wordpress sites.

Then I though maybe it was a bad plugin. I still had TinyMCE advanced installed from a while back. I started to disable plugins to see if the plugins could be causing any issues, to no avail.

What to do next?

I pretty much decided to start digging on Google after plugin deactivation didn’t do anything.

I found a couple blog posts from people that were having visual editor problems in Wordpress, and they didn’t seem to have very good opinions of the later Wordpress 2.5 upgrade in general. But, they did help me to find a link to the Wordpress support pages that had information about the issue.

Browser caching issues…

Among the various suggestions on how to fix the issue, I found this one:

2. Clear your browser’s cache, quit it, start it again, go back to the write page and force-reload it several times, while holding down Shift (Firefox) or Ctrl (IE).

This suggestion, as you can see, was number two in the list. There are 4 suggestions of things to try on that page if you are experiencing similar Wordpress visual editor problems.

Personally, I always run into web page issues that can be cleared up through clearing the browser cache, so that is the first one that I tried. I simply cleared my browser cache (Firefox 3) and didn’t even restart my browser.

Yeah! It worked!

I feel lucky because I was able to get this issue resolved rather quickly and after I had fixed the problem it seemed pretty simple to do.

If you are experience Wordpress visual editor problems…

… The you should follow the link above to read the various suggestions and give them a try. It seems that compression issues on a javascript file can also cause the problem, but my guess is that it worth trying to clear your browser cache first, as that is relatively easy to do, and it fixed my problem right away.