On April 23rd, 2007, I encountered the following problem with my WordPress blog: all of a sudden, the WP visual editor did not show the icons for formatting the text any longer! Also, I could not switch between “visual” and “code” view… that was weird, because I haven’t changed anything! At that time, I still had WP 2.1 installed.

So, I switched to WP 2.1.3, and for a short while, the problem disappeared… but the next day, it was there again! I guess it had something to to with the browser cache.

As I found out, the problem was caused by Ryan Duff’s WP-ContactForm plugin in version 1.4.3, which does not seem to be compatible with WP 2.1 or higher.

When the above plugin is activated, the visual editor looks like this:

As you can see, all icons for formatting the text are gone…

After deactivating the plugin, all works fine again:

This seems to be a known bug which not only occurs with WP-ContactForm, but also with other WP-plugins or even with Firefox addons (see this post on the wordpress.org support site). You might also want to do a google search on realtinymce is not defined.

I deactivated WP-ContactForm and looked for a different contact form plugin - which I have just installed and which is properly working with WP 2.1.3, see this post.

Well, the only question that I have found no answer to is:
Why did it work for such a long time before?

I haven’t changed anything within my WordPress installation lately!

Well, we have been moved to a bigger server by our provider… that was when the problem appeared for the first time. I guess that was just a coincidence, as I am very content with all-inkl - especially with the great and quick support!