This post is a bit off-topic, but seeing as how I found a fix for an issue that seems to be affecting a lot of WordPress users, and I find many a solution to my WordPress issues on other blogs, I thought I would post.
If you are finding that activating certain plugins on your self-hosted WordPress installation is breaking the Visual Editor, this may be the fix you are looking for.
While I am not sure where I found the original solution, this fix has saved me countless hours of headaches in the past, and also fixed a recent issue where activating certain plugins would cause the “Write Post” page to only show the HTML editor.
Seems that somehow an extra carriage return at the end of a .php file can cause all sorts of issues with plugins. The cause, I am not sure – could be an unzip artifact. Open the .php pages of the troublesome plugins using a text editor (I am using TextWrangler, which also can show line numbers – a helpful way to see that extra return at the end) and manually delete the extra returns at the end – usually after a closing “?>” (without the quotes).
TextWrangler allows you to actually open the files directly from the server and save to the server, but you may have to download the entire plugin folder, open all the .php pages in your text editor, remove those extra returns, and re-upload the plugin folder/files.
Hope that helps out some of you semi-techie people like me trying to do things yourself. This error is so obscure I doubt you’d ever discover it on your own. I had a programmer looking at this issue and he was amazed when I told him of the fix.
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Tags: art, blog, OS X, plugin, troubleshooting, WordPress
Thanks for the info! I was having the same problem with a plugin that I had just installed and you tidbit fixed it.
Great to hear, glad it helped! A pretty obscure fix if you don’t know to look for it.
I’ve tried this but with no success, thanks for the hope though!
Sorry to hear this didn’t help, but at the least it’s one thing you can cross off your list.