WordPress MU

One of my WPMU blogs is having trouble displaying changes, either content (posts) or design (themes, widgets), and it seems to have coincided with my upgrade to 2.7. I was informed by a user that on her blog, recent posts were not being displayed. Upon further review, I can see that it’s not just new posts that aren’t showing up, but other changes to the blog as well: a new theme or new widget in the sidebar, for example.

Here’s a bit more information about the specific situation:

• I’m using WPMU 2.7, and this problem appears to be happening with only one of many blogs (this one: http://oaklandtech.com/staff/jbojorquez/ ).
• The April 13th post appears as the most recent, but there are also posts from April 20th and April 27th, which do not appear.
• The query_posts offset option is not the problem (the index.php for the theme doesn’t use the offset option).
• The attributes of the posts which appear and those which don’t (post status, categories, tags, etc.) appear to be exactly the same.
• Another problem, which appears to be related, is that the default post calendar widget displays April, even though we’re in May.
• If I modify the blog’s theme, the new theme does not appear, even after refreshing the page and clearing the cache.
• If I add a widget to the sidebar, it also doesn’t appear.

OK, here’s the weird part:

• If I log in, as admin, and then re-visit the blog, the problems above all seem to go away: The most recent posts appear, the May calendar is displayed, and the new theme appears.
• This solution (logging in as admin) is on a per computer/per browser basis. In other words, if I log in with Firefox, the problems seem to be resolved, permanently (i.e., even after closing the Firefox session and re-opening, and not logging in as admin), for Firefox only. The problems persist in IE or Safari or Chrome, at least until I log in.

Based on the above, my gut is that the problem is either permissions-related or cookie-related, but I don’t have a clue where to start checking.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Are you running any caching?
Did you try disabling all the plugins?

I can confirm I'm not seeing May.

Good thought on the plugins, but that appears to be part of the problem. Yes, I disabled all plugins, but in the same way that other 'design' changes (theme, widgets) aren't showing up, neither are the plugin changes.

For example, in this blog http://oaklandtech.com/staff/jbojorquez/, I disabled the plugin/widget that displays the 'News from Oakland Tech' on the sidebar. Yet it still displays items, although the most recent post it displays is from April 13th, and many have been added since.

On the other hand, this blog http://oaklandtech.com/staff/dchai/, which is behaving properly, displays the error messages resulting from the plugin being disabled (actually, deleted).

Basically, for the 'problem' blog, it's behaving like everything (posts, plugins, theme changes, widget changes) is cached from April 13th, and nothing new is retrieved/refreshed until you log in.

I'm sure it's something simple, but I'm just not seeing it yet.

And no, I'm not running any caching, that I know of.

I'm not sure it's something simple, becasue it's stumping us.

OK, something else I just noticed, which I'm sure is related: on my 'main' blog, http://oaklandtech.com/staff/, an RSS feed widget on the right side (PTSA Yahoo Group) stopped displaying recent posts on . . . surprise! . . . April 13th. Other than that, I haven't noticed or heard about any other problems with the main site.

I wish I could say with certainty what changed on April 13th, but I actually upgraded to 2.7 several weeks prior to that, and things seemed to work fine for awhile.

Brute force problem solving:

- deactivate ALL the plugins on that blog
- clear out all the widgets
- put it back on the default theme

Then see if it clears up.

OK, all plugins have been deactivated, all widgets removed, and theme changed to default.

The new-content-not-appearing-until-you-log-in problem still exists, and the default them is not displaying properly, as you can see http://oaklandtech.com/staff/jbojorquez/. The theme display problem also goes away (i.e., theme displays correctly) after you log in.

Would it be worth upgrading to 2.7.1, to see if that fixes the problem?

seeing that the upgrade from 2.7 to 2.7.1 is just 1-click I'd do it.

I would almost want to just recreate the blog itself. Export all the posts, blow away the blog, make a new one, import the posts and set it up again.

If it's affecting just one blog, it has to be something in its particular database fields.

Well, it was a caching problem after all. Specifically, the WP Super Cache plugin, which I deactivated just around the time the problems started. I'm not sure exactly what it was doing, or why it wasn't affecting all blogs, but deleting the entire /wp-content/cache/supercache/ directory seemed to do the trick. The blog is now displaying up to date content and design.

Thanks for your help.

"And no, I'm not running any caching, that I know of."

Deactivating isn't the same as removing the cached files. The plugin - when installed - has an options page to clear the cache.

I have the same problem with all my wordpress blogs. I even deleted WP Super Cache plugin, but the problem still persists.

Do we manually have to clear the cache, or is it an automatic option in the plugin?