Installed Wordpress a few days ago and wrote lots of posts (copied from an old wordpress.com account) with no trouble at all. Noticed today that new posts have some options unavailable in the sidebar - I can’t add a featured image, categories, tags, these options aren’t greyed out, they just aren’t there anymore.
Switched themes: no change.
Clear cache: no change.
Updated WP: no change.
Setup new IF account: same issue occurs.
I’m new to InfinityFree hosting but not new to WordPress, and cannot for the life of me think about what on earth is going on.
I had this issue on a previous IF account, and set-up a new one to see if it still happened on a clean install. It does, so I assume it’s something up with IF x WP compatibility somewhere.
Incompatibility between InfinityFree and WordPress.org is very unlikely as it is opensource and IF is basically a free PHP hosting.
I noticed that you have mentioned WordPress.COM, instead of ORG, which means that your WordPress is from a commercial version rather than an open-source version. There is slight difference between the two but you should be able to export site data instead of moving files over.
Just to accelerate troubleshooting, this is deifnately not related to themes or cache or WordPress version, it’s more likely about the WordPress files being different.
Are you using the exact same theme on your site here as you were on WordPress.com? I believe WordPress hides features in the editor if they are not supported by the theme. So if your theme doesn’t support featured images, WordPress won’t let you set them up.
Apologies! I should’ve specified that I am using Wordpress.org download (straight install from here) and the content I was copying was from my old free .com.
So, the content and dashboard should look the same in both places as it’s all the same theme, words, images etc
Yes, same theme exactly. I actually had the .com and the .org open at the same time so I could match all the settings and tweak some of the customisations that couldn’t be copied over.
Everything on the dashboard was working fine when I was creating the blogs, and then suddenly the other day, those options just disappeared.
I could replicate the issue on a clean WordPress installation, on all default themes. What was interesting is that the feature would sometimes appear, and then disappear again.
Having a look at the console, I noticed that it didn’t show up when some requests where failing, which I believe are internal REST API calls failing because of the security system (this is mentioned in the following article):
One of the requests failing is wp-json/wp/v2/taxonomies, the request for taxonomies (tags and categories) which explains why you cannot set them.
One solution I’ve tried out is to install Classic Editor and use it alongside Gutenberg, creating the main content in the block editor, and using Classic to set the fields you’re otherwise unable to in the block editor. It’s not ideal, but it should work, as Classic doesn’t seem to use the REST API.
If you have a custom domain, you could also set up Cloudflare, which bypasses the security system’s limitation.
Thankyou for checking it out so thoroughly! I recall seeing something about the REST on the Site Health Check list but all of that is so beyond my understanding I needn’t have even looked!
I’ll try the Classic editor for now to stop me pulling out my hair.
I’ve been holding back linking my custom domain until the site was tested but perhaps I’ll do this sooner if it could be the answer. Is Cloudflare something to install from the Dashboard like WP or something external?