Cornerstone content gone for page, but custom CSS/JS remain

Support
#1

Hi – kind of new to Cornerstone but was about 20 hours in to a single page app for a client and everything had been going smoothly until tonight. I had been editing some of the Options specific to Buttons (button border color and background color), and editing the Fonts in the Templates tab before returning to the Content tab of my page where I added a few lines of custom CSS and Saved.

At this point, I could see the content still existed on my page in the Cornerstone editor, but when I clicked the button in the left sidebar to view the URL of the page outside of Cornerstone, it showed no content – just a blank page with a header and the Home link. I leave the Cornerstone editor and return to the dashboard, and then return to the editor to edit the page and now the Cornerstone editor is also reflecting that all of my content is gone as well. Custom CSS and JS still exists however.

I have not edited the page outside of Cornerstone in any way, I did not change the Stack which I know can affect things in Cornerstone pretty severely. I literally updated a few options for the buttons, began updating fonts in the Templates tab before going to the Content tab and saying “No thanks” to saving my font changes, and added some custom CSS using the CSS editor in Cornerstone. Purging all caches through WPEngine’s dashboard has done nothing to fix the issue.

I now am left wondering what possibly could have happened that deleted all of the content out of the page. The site is hosted through WPEngine so I’m hoping that it can be restored to some point in the last 24 hours and I’ll only lose roughly 5 hours of the 25 or so I had put into the page that has now seemingly been erased…

http://executivepower.wpengine.com – let me know if I can provide any login detais. Thanks.

#2

Wanted to add a reply that this is not urgent at all any more because thankfully I was able to restore 90% of my work via WP Engine’s automatic backups, but still would be curious as to what would have caused the issue in the first place. Pretty scary to anybody out there who does not think about backing up their work (although honestly, daily backups should be one of the first things to be set up).

#3

Hi there,

Thanks for writing in.

Are you able to provide screenshots? It could be an internal server error or edited accidentally lead to data corruption. I can’t confirm any of that and we need to gather information first. Are you able to reproduce this issue again? If yes, please clone it in a staging and we’ll check :slight_smile:

Thanks!

#4

Hey @Rad,

Since I did the full restore of the website, I don’t have anything that I can provide but I think I may have recreated it yesterday. On a different page, I was on the “Content” tab of Cornerstone picking a page to edit. When I chose a page, the content showed up as expected on the right side of the Preview while Cornerstone loaded the page. However, once I got into the page, all content was gone and the Preview screen was blank. This time, I exited back to the Content tab without hitting “Save”, and re-loaded the page and all of the content loaded successfully.

I’m guessing that there must have been some kind of error somewhere/somehow (not sure if by my host, or by Cornerstone) that didn’t load content properly and if you hit “Save”, it saves it in that state (which makes sense because in that moment, there is literally no content on the page).

My best guess is that the previous time this had happened, I had pulled out the custom CSS panel and made it full screen while the page was still loading, and hit “Save” without seeing that the content hadn’t loaded behind it.

Basically to anybody reading this, make sure you’re doing daily backups, but also make sure that the page fully loads before doing any editing – as simple as that sounds, you may not think to do it if you have one of the customizer panels pulled out all the way and can’t see what’s behind it.

Thanks – if there is anything else I can provide, let me know.

#5

Hi there,

We prefer to get to the bottom of this as we do not have reports like this and it is a devastating effect which should be checked.

I suggest that you isolate the case by doing the steps below:

  • Clone your website to a staging one so that data loss will not be critical
  • Turn off all plugins and clear any kind of cache you may have regarding plugins or server cache and browser cache. Just leave the Cornerstone activated.
  • Make sure you use the parent X theme and not the child theme
  • Make sure you use the theme version 5.2.2 and Cornerstone version 2.1.3
  • Add a test page and try to add elements one by one and save on each step.
  • Try to recreate the issue and write it down when does it happen.
  • Add another test page and try to do the same and see if at the same step you will encounter the problem or not.

Give us detailed information regarding the case with the name of the test page and steps to reproduce the issue so that we can do the same on our installation.

If you can not recreate the problem while in the isolated environment, try to turn on plugins one by one and do the test again to find the culprit.

I know this might be a time-consuming process, but that is the only way that you can give us more informed request which we can follow up.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.