Some people using one of our themes for their website have been using it for years, and suddenly experience the front end editor stops working. One of the possible explanations they think may be the cause of this is that they think the state of the theme editor can be turned on or off by our company, or people think it is perhaps related to the state of the license. Let me explain once and for all that this is a misconception. Also in this post i will share various ways to restore the issue with the broken theme editor.
What causes the theme editor to break
We do not control whether the site editor works on your site. The theme will always keep on working as-is, regardless of the state of the license. The theme cannot, and will not self-destruct in time. If it no longer functions then it simply means some other component on your website was added, modified or updated and this event introduced a conflict with the theme and that causes the theme to malfunction.
The fact that you, your hosting provider, or your WP installation itself, or some other script updates those components or makes changes is something we don’t control, neither the fact that those updated controls or changes could cause conflicts with the theme is something we cannot prevent from happening.
Examples of such events:
- someone or something updated the PHP of your web server
- someone or something updated WordPress of your site
- a WordPress plugins was recently added and enabled, or modified
- javascripts was added to the content of your website.
Resolving the broken editor issue after it occurs
There are multiple ways to resolve the conflict:
Restore the ‘state’ of all external components to their previous state.
If you restore each external component (external, as in external from the perspective of the WordPress theme) then the theme will simply start to function properly again. Since we don’t know exactly which components your site uses, and since we don’t control those components, we are not able to restore those components to this previous state for you.
Contact your hosting provider if you need help with restoring these external components to their previous state.
Update your theme
Alternatively you could check if you are running an outdated version of the theme; it is possible a newer version of the theme resolves a conflict with a component that conflicts with outdated theme versions. Follow this link for instructions to see what version your website is currently running, and to see the latest version number and for instructions on how to obtain the latest version.
Switch to a different page builder
The last option i can offer to resolve the issue of the broken theme editor is to switch to a different page builder. The existing page builder used in the themes will be sunset on the 1st of jan 2023. More on that can be found in this post, including instructions on how to switch to a different page builder.
Preventing conflicts in production for your website
Rather than resolving conflicts after they occur we think it would be better to prevent the issue, especially on a ‘live’ website.
You can prevent the conflicts on a production website by having a staging environment and first testing the new component(s) you want to use on that staging environment first (prior to changing those components directly on the website, and then figuring out something breaks).
Contact your hosting provider to see what options they have available.