In one site (Site A) I have the latest versions installed of :
– Version 2.5.9 Page Builder by SiteOrigin, and
– Version 1.9.5 SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle
On another site (Site B) I have old versions:
– Version 2.4.19 Page Builder by SiteOrigin, and
– Version 1.7.2 SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle
The drop-down menus for Paragraph, font and font size work perfectly in Site B, and they did work in Site A until I updated to the latest versions.
In the version that works, when I click on the little triangle to activate the drop-down, the drop down items appear. e.g. Heading 1, Heading 2, etc
In the version that doesn’t work (Site A) when I click on the little downward-pointing triangle to activate the drop-down the only thing that happens is that the triangle points upwards. No drop-down item appear. i.e. I can’t see Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. Therefore I am unable to do any Paragraph, Font, or Font Size formatting using the drop downs.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
A new version of SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle came through moments after posting the above…
So, I upgraded to Version 1.9.6, the latest version. And, Hehehe, the drop-downs are working again.
HOWEVER…
SiteOrigin now demonstrates a different problem. It is adding random characters sequences of character like these: � �  whenever a page is updated and reopened for editing. These characters appear wherever there were characters, sometimes, but not always replacing them.
I found something suggesting that this is to do with “encoding”… Deeply technical stuff about ISO-8859-1, UFT8, and non-UTF8 encoding… https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1461907/html-encoding-issues-%C3%82-character-showing-up-instead-of-nbsp
It’s all way beyond me to figure out this all means, and what’s made this start happening.
Hopefully a whizz bang techo who understands this stuff may be able to offer a suggestion as to whats causing this and how to correct it.
Having fruitlessly searched for fellow sufferer who has solved this SiteOrigin bug, and shared their wisdom, I headed into the belly of the whale myself…
Here is the clue that enabled me to solve the problem, which I found on pento.net – https://pento.net/2014/04/07/wordpress-and-utf-8/
It seems to me, but I could be wrong, that the SiteOrigin editor problem is caused by the latest version of SiteOrigin expecting utf8mb4 encoding. However, on old MySQL verions the encoding is UTF-8. (WordPress 4.2 has full UTF-8 support, however editing without PageBuilder does not result in the spurious character problem.)
pento.net’s clue to the solution says, “You need to be running MySQL 5.5.14, or higher.”
However, the cheap hosting server I’m on running is MySQL version 5.0, and part of why this hosting is cheap is that it has MySQL 5.0, and only MySQL 5.0, and I can’t upgrade MySQL on this server. (shared MySQL 5.0 environment?)
MY SHORT TERM SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM:
Install a plugin called “WP Rollback” and rollback:
>>> Page Builder by SiteOrigin to Version 2.5.8
>>> SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle to Version 1.9.3
Viola!! No more spurious character.
MY LONGER-TERM SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM:
Migrate my site to a hosting service which keeps MySQL up to date.
BTW, I found this amazing plugin that helps both with site backup, and with setup of subdirectory/staging sites for testing (important if you’re using the WP Rollback plugin)
Hi 12Steps,
Just as a heads up – we’ve definitely seen your post. We’re looking into this issue and your last reply (based on how things are currently looking) should be key in resolving this issue at a code level. For the most part, we’re trying to work out why this is happening as we haven’t really changed anything since the last update that should cause this.
Very sorry about this! :(
Hi 12Steps,
Just as a heads up – we were able to resolve this issue in SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle 1.9.7 thanks due to your comment. :)