Page's Text Elements Disappeared and Will Not Display

Interesting, I didn’t even realize I’d done this to only two of my pages. Thanks for catching that. I’ll see what I can do about switching those.

EDIT: I took a quick look, and I can’t see any difference between these ‘archive’ pages and the normal pages. I’m trying to switch them to the normal page format, but the solution isn’t obvious to me. Is this a simple setting somewhere that’ll change the page type?

One other interesting bit of background info: These pages were fine (headers and text showing) for years… until I made a couple slight modifications (yesterday) to my main navigation bar. I deleted a section from one dropdown, and that’s when this all began.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by Guitar Answer Guy.

Rikard,

Actually, what happens when you click “edit post” is that you are taken to one of my blog posts–a post completely unrelated to the page. It takes you into edit mode for this post:

This is another issue I was seeing that is related to this, but didn’t want to confuse you guys by trying to include too much information in my original question.

So yes, there’s a lot of weird stuff suddenly going on here–and none of it seemed to start happening until a few days ago. Prior to that, these pages were fine, I was able to view and edit those headers (and intro paragraph), etc. Suddenly, things have become very strange.

The only way you can get into edit mode for the page is by first going to Pages > All Pages > “Guitar Care and Maintenance Articles”

You’ll see that it’s listed there as a normal page, just like all the others. Not an “archive” page (as far as I can tell).

Do you think that completely deleting the current “../favorite-guitar-information-resources/..” page and then re-creating it (with the same exact URL) might fix the problem? There’s not much content on the page, so I could probably do this in a matter of minutes without much impact on my visitors.

I’d like to keep that exact URL, as I’m unsure of how a URL change might affect my SEO ranking for that particular page. Otherwise, I could re-create the page with a whole new URL, put redirects in place, update my nav menus, etc. and that would probably do the trick. However, I’d prefer to NOT have to do that.

I’ve done a few more experiments with this page, and nothing I do to try to affect content changes will actually show up live. I can, however, unpublish the page, and that does indeed remove it from the live site. However, content changes have absolutely no effect. Seems my database has somehow become corrupted.

I’ll give it a try. Thanks for reminding me to empty the bin of the old page. I probably would’ve forgotten about that (because I’ve never actually deleted any pages or posts) and would be wondering why my link wouldn’t change or update.

One last question: if I hired a developer, do you think they’d be able to dig into the database and find (and correct) the actual problem? Or, is that unlikely? If there’s a chance this can be corrected, I might be willing to spend some money to hire a developer (I’ve worked with him before).

I’ve not tried it yet, no. I need to ensure I have a few hours free just in case something doesn’t go as planned–so I have time to react accordingly. I’ll probably try it this weekend.

Thank you. I do have a staging server available as part of my hosting plan, but I’ve been very lazy and not using it. I’ll make sure I do that going-forward.

I probably still would’ve missed this one though, even on a staging site. I checked on archive.org, and it appears this might’ve happened back in March or April of 2018. That’s the last time I see those page elements as visible at the top of the “Care and Maintenance” page.

Thanks Rickard. I think you can close/lock this thread if you’d like.