Help! My WordPress Media Upload Buttons And Visual Editor Aren’t Working!

The problem

Have your image, video, audio, and other media buttons stopped working? Are you clicking on them, but nothing’s happening? Is your visual editor showing html tags rather than a WYSIWYG interface?

Aha! You, my friend, are probably experiencing a case of too-many-page-revisions-itis.

How can you tell if this is indeed the cause of your non-responsive buttons and suddenly non-visual visual editor? Scroll down your WordPress editing screen: Does it end abruptly after the Page Revisions box heading, like this…

… when it should be looking more like this…

That’s a sure sign that you have too many page revisions in your database, which has thrown its metaphorical hands up in the air at your penchant for constant change and gone to sulk in the corner, leaving your editing page only partly loaded and partly working.

The solution

The solution is a two part one: First, you need to clear all your old page revisions out of your database, and secondly, you need to take steps to manage your page revisions to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Let’s look at each part in turn.

Part 1: Remove old page revisions from the database

Firstly, as is good practice when making any significant changes to your site, backup your database.

Then, do the following yourself or grab a geek and ask them to do the following:

Open phpMyAdmin, select your database and run the following command:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

This will delete all post revisions in your database. You can also tailor the command to only delete post revisions for specific pages if you prefer.

Part 2: Manage your page revisions

Even if you haven’t experienced the panic and confusion that can set in when your WordPress editing screen stops working as it should, I’d recommend doing one of the following to manage your page revisions before they do become a problem. Prevention, as the ubiquitous “they” say, is always better than cure, after all.

Option 1:
Add the following line to your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',10);

Replace 10 with the number of revisions that you want the database to store for each page.

Option 2:
Install the Revision Control plugin to manage the number of page revisions for your site as a whole or on a page-by-page basis.