Cornerstone content missing from website

[foureyes]

We just went through the process of bringing a website live. We flipped over the domain and some pages are totally blank, aside from the header and footer, other have partial content and then some are totally fine. When I look at pro builder, in visual mode the problematic pages are blank. However, if I open up the standard WP editor in text mode all the CS elements are there (see below). Can you offer any advise? This is odd and concerning. Thank you!

[cs_content][cs_element_section _id="1"][cs_element_row _id="2"][cs_element_column _id="3"] [/cs_element_column][cs_element_column _id="4"][cs_element_gap _id="5"][cs_element_text _id="6"][/cs_element_column][/cs_element_row][cs_element_row _id="11"][cs_element_column _id="12"][cs_element_gap _id="13"][/cs_element_column][/cs_element_row][/cs_element_section][cs_element_section _id="19"][cs_element_row _id="20"][cs_element_column _id="21"][cs_element_image _id="22"][cs_element_gap _id="23"][/cs_element_column][cs_element_column _id="24"][cs_element_text _id="25"][cs_element_gap _id="26"][x_clear][gravityform id="2" title="false" description="false" ajax="true" tabindex="1"][cs_element_gap _id="29"][/cs_element_column][/cs_element_row][/cs_element_section][cs_element_section _id="34"][cs_element_row _id="35"][cs_element_column _id="36"][cs_element_global_block _id="37"][/cs_element_column][/cs_element_row][/cs_element_section][/cs_content]

[basanta]

Hi There,

Thanks for writing in!
Looks like the pages contents are some how corrupted. This is because of several reason.
The page may be edited outside cornerstone or any plugin conflict does the issue.
Also the issue may be due to domain migration. Please note that it is not recommended to edit it to edit outside Cornerstone because we will loose the ability to edit it back due to content serialization. Other cause might be if the database content was directly edited. Unfortunately, if this two happened we have to rebuild the page.

If you can provide us your website details in a secure note so that we can check what could be the cause of issue.

Thanks

[foureyes]

I do not see a secure note button.

Also, we did not edit outside of CS, we made a copy first,

I looked over one page in teh wp_postmeta table and _cornetone_settings & data seem to be all there. From what I can tell everything is correct. Is there anyplace I should be looking over.

Please let me know where I can find the mehtod to send a secure note. Thanks

[basanta]

Hi There,

Thanks for the details!

Can you please confirm which pages you have the issue? Seems I edited few pages and those are working fine.

Thanks

[foureyes]

I will add them to the secure note. Thanks!

[foureyes]

If compare the _cornerstone_data of a page that is working to one that is not, the ones that are not are clearly missing closing brackets:

}]},


How can this happen from switching a domain? Recreating pages is a massive endeavor and restoring backup will still require a lot of work. Saying this corrupted is extremely concerning since, in this case, we did not updates a thing other than the domain.

We need to know how this type of massive corruption could happen and away to fix and prevent it.

[foureyes]

We restored a backup. The site is up. However, my questions still stand.

[mldarshana]

Hi There,

Glad you were able to restore it. We do not recommend simply changing the domain name, instead we recommend to follow our migration process explained here (https://theme.co/apex/forum/t/cornerstone-content-builder-migration/126/1).

We cannot comment on what happened as we do not have enough information, however you may try creating a staging site by following the above guide and see if you’re getting any errors.

Thanks!

[foureyes]

We have 100+ clients running X or Pro and this has never happened. Whatever the glitch, it is fixed via backups. Honestly, I am very disappointed. The _cornerstone_data is clearly corrupted and updating a domain should have no impact on that what so ever and if it does, that is flaw on the code not on the developer. Your response is way to casual for something so serious. Twenty years doing this, Not my first rodeo. There is a serialization issue. Love the theme, not appreciating the support approach.

[Prasant]

Hello @mjsammut,

I can completely understand your frustration over here and I am really sorry for the problems you faced. However, please understand that we try our level best to help customers with the problems they face and most of the times we go above and beyond supporting even customizations.

It’s good that you had a backup and thing are normal now. However, the problem you faced is quite intriguing. Can you please tell me how did you updated the website URL? If the problem started to come-up after updating the website URL and there must be something that was not done properly.

You can take a look at following tutorial to relevant information.

https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/change-wordpress-url/

Thanks.

[foureyes]

One should always have backups!

We utilize Better Search & Replace. OR WP-Migrate DB. A simple URL update. We have done it more times than I can count with X and Pro.

We cloned the website a few times and ran tests in several PHP environments and the 2 latest WP versions. In our dev environment no issues. On the live server we can repeat the issue like clockwork, albeit, our dev environment is setup to mirror production.

Going after the cornerstone data in the post meta table can add up to a lot of updates. The only difference we really see are resources on the production (shared) server could be the issue. In any case, we just did a manual update via the db and it worked fine.

Thank you.

[Alaa]

Hi @mjsammut

It’s really hard to tell what happened, it could be something wrong happened during the search and replace process (although I doubt that), it could also be an incomplete database cloning (the server timed out when exporting/importing the cloned database), double checking number of rows exported after the export process should prove that or not.

It’s good that you had a backup and got it working fine now, however, I would appreciate if you reported any similar issues back to us if this happened again in case you managed to narrow it down to a certain step.

Thanks.