[Brad GParticipant]

Oliver, the patch would need to be applied. Every dot (.) then number (1) indicates a newer patch. Give the new patch a whirl, and see what happens.

[KoryKeymaster]

Oliver, Brad is correct in that every time you see a release with an additional dot (.) followed by a number, this indicates a new update has been implemented by Visual Composer and that you should update to the most recent version. Usually version updates increment in a fashion that is a little easier to follow (i.e. v4.0, v4.1, v4.2, v4.3, et cetera), however Visual Composer seems to be releasing a lot of little patches lately to account for some of the issues that have arisen with using the plugin along with WordPress v3.9, so instead of releasing these as “major” updates, they’re kind of tacking them onto the end (i.e. v4.1, v4.1.1, v 4.1.1.1, et cetera). Hopefully this helps to provide a little more clarity for you on this matter.

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Brad, as always, thank you for chiming in to help out! 🙂

[Deanna JParticipant]

How do you install (or use) the patch?

[Daphne DParticipant]

I’m a brand-new X user. I was having trouble uploading Visual Composer before this particular issue. And I still can’t get it to upload. There’s a message that says, “The installation and activation process is starting. This process may take a while on some hosts, so please be patient.” But is over an hour normal? It appears to be doing nothing… 🙁

Help appreciated!

[Carsten BParticipant]

Hi!

I’m missing the X-shortcode button (and the rev slider dropdown by the way) in the text editor.

WP: 3.9
X: 1.8.3
VC: 4.1.1.1
X-Shortcode: 2.1.0
Rev Slider: 4.3.6
Mailpoet: 2.6.5
CF7: 3.8
AIO SEO: 2.1.5
W3 Total Cache: 0.9.4
WP Importer: 0.6.1

Any ideas?

Cheers!
Carsten

[KoryKeymaster]

Deanna, you can install the patch by following the instructions listed out in the Updating Your Theme and Plugins article in the Knowledge Base. Go down to the Updating Plugins section and you’ll see a section for Visual Composer. Once you’re there, you can pretty much start from step 3 and you should be good to go. Thanks!

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Daphne, thanks for writing in and we’re sorry to hear that the Visual Composer plugin has been giving you some trouble. The error you’re experiencing certainly sounds like it is most likely something unique to your hosting environment that is keeping the plugin from installing as this is not normal (I’m assuming you’re using the automatic installer via the prompt that appears after activating X). In that case, I would recommend you give the instructions in the Updating Your Theme and Plugins article in the Knowledge Base a shot. Go down to the Updating Plugins section and you’ll see a section for Visual Composer. Once you’re there, you can pretty much start from step 3 and you should be good to go. If you’re still having issues after attempting to install the plugin manually instead of uploading it or using the theme prompt, we’ll be happy to assist you with this issue but we’ll first need you to provide us with some information below (don’t forget to select Set as private reply to ensure that your data remains hidden):

1. Your URL.
2. Your WordPress login credentials.
3. Your FTP credentials (in case we need to check anything out on your server).

Thanks, and remember to give the manual installation instructions a shot first!

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Carsten, you appear to have the most up to date version of the X – Shortcodes plugin installed, so you should be good to go. A few of our users had written in saying that they couldn’t see the button in the editor after updating, but informed us soon after that the button appeared. This is almost certainly attributed to your browser cache, and it is recommended that you clear this out in order to ensure that you can see everything after updating. Regarding the Revolution Slider dropdown in the editor, this is functionality that is handled via their plugin and we do not have any control over this. Like almost every other theme and plugin provider, the WordPress v3.9 update has likely caused some problems with their plugin and you will need to wait until a newer version is released that will hopefully remedy this issue. Thanks!

[Bryan HParticipant]

As requested:

Current version of WordPress: 3.9
Current version of X: 1.8.3
Current version of X – Shortcodes: 2.1.0
Current version of Visual Composer: 4.1.1.1
A list of any third party plugins installed on your WordPress installation: WP Read-Only, all those needed for X Theme.
A list of any third party scripts implemented on your WordPress installation: None
A list of any customizations made to your WordPress installation: Running wordpress out of a subdirectory and wp-content out of the root directory. All this works as expected and has never contributed to the bug I’m experiencing with X.

My Issue:
Visual Composer dropping changes to text fields. I have a text object with the text: “Here is a word I want to highlight.” When I edit the text in visual composer to be “Here is a <span>word</span> I want to highlight.” with the css being correctly defined in the customizer, the <span> tags are dropped after saving and no change is reflected on the page. If, however, I do all this through the classical editor, the span tags work as expected.

A detailed explanation of how to recreate the issue you are experiencing:
Make a text object. Save. Verify it displays. Add span tags (with a css styling defined in customizer) using the VC and click save. See how the span tags are dropped. Now try with the classical editor and see that they are retained.

Thanks for the help. X is a great theme, I enjoy using it, so I hope we can get this ironed out soon.

[KoryKeymaster]

Hey Bryan,

Thanks for writing in and for your kind words about the theme. We certainly understand that this situation is less than ideal and are trying our best to look into each and every one of these issues that is coming up even though the evidence is pointing towards continued problems with Visual Composer itself.

After reviewing your situation and testing this myself, this appears to be a nuance of Visual Composer and some type of filtering or sanitization they’re doing on various inputs (i.e. the editor, standard text input fields, et cetera). The strange thing is that it only seems to be limited to <span> tags, and only in certain instances. For example, if I simply add a <span> tag to any input via Visual Composer, it gets filtered out as you mentioned. However, other tags such as <strong>, <em>, and even <div> are kept when saving out the post. Furthermore, if you add inline styling to your <span> tag, it will get kept in this instance (very strange).

I further tested this by removing our do_shortcode() and wpautop() functions around the output of the shortcode in our plugin, and as expected doing this had no effect on this situation as these shouldn’t interfere with your content by stripping out markup anyway.

At this time, there is nothing we can do about this as it is related to how Visual Composer functions at a core level and is something that would need to be altered by the Visual Composer team. I found a couple workarounds for this, neither of which is necessarily ideal, but they will certainly work:

1. Add your <span> tags to your markup as needed and give it some inline styling that won’t alter how anything looks or functions. For example, if you didn’t plan on adding any borders to the element in question you could enter in <span style=“border: none;”> due to the fact that the inline styling seems to keep this element in place and implementing border: none; will not change the appearance of your output in any way in this example.

2. Utilize the Raw HTML element instead of the Text element as it will keep the <span> tags in place. You will need to make sure that you add any additional markup as needed such as <p> tags to ensure that things are spaced out properly.

This certainly seems like an odd piece of functionality/sanitization due to the fact that it works in the standard WordPress editor but not in Visual Composer and also since it only seems to filter out <span> tags with no inline styling. At this time, there is nothing more we can do for this issue since it is strictly plugin related. If you want, we recommend taking this up with the developers to see what they say via their ThemeForest comments or via their support system if you have a license you’ve purchased separately from the bundled version of Visual Composer provided with X.

Thanks!

[Anthony TParticipant]

Hi,

I really like X theme and I understand this isn’t your fault but lost a whole day of work so hoping to work this out.

I’ve followed your instructions but I still have no front end Visual Composer (No button appears). Interestingly, the “Screen Options” and “Help” in the top right don’t work either on the “Add Page”. I do have the Shortcodes button though.

Here’s the information you asked for.

1. WordPress 3.9
2. X 1.8.3 (Using Child theme)
3. X – Shortcodes 2.1.0
4. Visual Composer 4.1.1.1
5.
Akismet 3.0.0
Backup Buddy 4.2.14.6
Contact Form 7 3.8
Force Regenerate Thumbnails 2.0.3
Gravity Forms 1.8.5
Gravity Forms Multilingual 1.2
Revolution Slider 4.1.4
W3 Total Cache 0.9.4
WooCommerce 2.1.7
WooCommerce Catalog Visibility Options 2.4.5
WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration 1.0
WooCommerce Product CSV Import Suite 1.9.3
WordPress Database Reset 2.3.1
WordPress Importer 0.6.1
WPML Multilingual CMS 3.1.4-b5
WPML String Translation 2.0.4-b3
WPML Translation Management 1.9.3-b3
6. None
7. Added topbar

Please help!

Thanks

[Carmen RParticipant]

Hi there, I just installed the theme, so no big worries by now, but I keep getting the “update” message in the visual composer. In fact I can still work, but is very annoying to have to keep pushing the “useless” update button for nothing.
I have done all the thing you say in the sticky post and everywhere 🙂 but nothing happened.

I though I’d leave my config at the moment in case this helps solving this issue.
I need to have this website working in two weeks, so lets hope you guys figure out what is going on 😀
My data:

1. WordPress 3.9
2. X 1.8.3
3. X – Shortcodes 2.1.0
4. Visual Composer 4.1.1.1

Hosted at CDMON.

My plugins are the just the ones that come with WP and the ones with the Theme 🙂

Thanx a lot and really hope this is solved soon!!

THANX!!

[Daphne DParticipant]

Thanks for the instructions! I was able to manually upload the visual composer 🙂 But now WP won’t upload the newest version 3.9 — it’s doing the same thing the visual composer was doing before… just sitting and sitting with no activity. Any suggestions? Are they related or do I need to contact WP?

Thanks in advance!

[Abby WParticipant]

This reply has been marked as private.

[Justin FParticipant]

Current version of WordPress:
3.9

Current version of X
Latest Version

Current version of X – Shortcodes

Current version of Visual Composer

A list of any third party plugins installed on your WordPress installation
none
A list of any third party scripts implemented on your WordPress installation
none

A list of any customizations made to your WordPress installation
none

A detailed description of the issue you are experiencing
Every time that a page is updated all my content and layout duplicate three or four times. Then the visual composer says ” Your page layout was created with previous Visual Composer version. Before converting your layout to the new version, make sure to read this page.” Even though i’ve already updated the VC.

A detailed explanation of how to recreate the issue you are experiencing
Build a page with 5 different content bands
Make the 2-5 content bands 1/3 + 2/3 column layouts
add an image on each of the 1/3 columns
add text on the 2/3 column
update
view page – layout is duplicated and messed up
go back to edit page
find that there’s multiple content bands
content that is not in bands and cannot be deleted

please help?

You can check out the issue here : http://fyclabs.com/dev/wordpress/our-team-3/

[Saruul HParticipant]

This reply has been marked as private.

[KoryKeymaster]

Anthony, regarding the Frontend Editor button not displaying, please see our response to Timothy on the first page of this thread. Regarding your Screen Options and Help tabs not working in the WordPress admin panel, this is almost certainly due to a JavaScript error. You seem to be having a lot of plugins running on your website so I would recommend disabling these one by one and then checking these tabs again to see if they start to function to determine which plugin is causing the issue. It is likely a conflict between two plugins and a library they’re running, but definitely perform this test to see if that helps to fix the issue.

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Carmen, have you taken some time to read through this article in the Knowledge Base yet (this is an adaptation of the Thread #1 link from our initial post on this thread). It goes into detail on the nature of this error, and if you haven’t taken time to read through this you will want to as it will help you to better understand why this happens and what you can do to avoid this error message.

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Daphne I would try checking with your hosting provider on this particular issue as it sounds like something related to your setup is causing this. Typically, this is due server configuration problems (i.e. underpowered, traceroute issues, packet loss, permissions errors, et cetera). Additionally, your host will be able to diagnose things much better due to the fact that they have a more complete view of your account and can work behind the scenes with you.

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Abby, please make sure you update your X – Shortcodes plugin to the latest version (v2.1.0) as it provides a fix for our own shortcode plugin with WordPress v3.9. Once you have done that, please refer to my answer to Carmen in this response for further information on this matter.

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Justin, I have followed the exact steps outlined in your information that you’ve provided and cannot seem to replicate this issue. Try right-clicking anywhere on your page in Chrome and select Inspect Element. Keep this prompt up and go through the steps you listed above on a new page and see if any errors occur in the console (a red “X” with a number next to it should appear in your upper or lower right corners of the console depending on what version of Chrome you’re using), click on them to see what they say. Copy and paste them here if anything comes up so that we can take a look at them. Also, make sure to select Update and see if any errors occur on this page after it has been loaded again and you experience this issue. Regarding the error message you’ve referenced, please refer to my response to Carmen in this reply for further information.

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Saruul, I’m not entirely sure about the exact nature of your inquiry. If you’re just asking if you are required to use Visual Composer with X, the answer is no, it is not a required plugin. It is something we’ve integrated with the theme as many users requested the use of a page-builder, but if you are comfortable “hand coding” your page layouts, then you’re good to go. If I have not fully addressed your question, please provide us with some further explanation of what you mean so that we can properly assist you.

[Author]

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