I will have to leave Mr Papa to respond to any Windows/IE specific issues although currently we have no other outstanding reports of problems so I do tend to the belief – understandably – that this is a local environmental issue with your site.

The CSS and JS cache will not effect any data as such. It is not a data cache. It simply combines all of the forum CSS and/or all of the forum JS into one single file to make load times quicker and to avoid the particular issue with older IE browsers. If it can work on your site it really is worth using.

However – there are some environments where the server will not allow its use and we still have to find out quite why that is. I would try it as you will find quickly enough iof it works for you and of it does not is is just as quickly disabled again. And of it does work for you it might just be what the IE8 user needs.

CSS/JS combine/cache didn’t make a difference, but I did temporarily switch to the Twenty Twelve and Thirteen themes. Although the TinyMCE buttons were small and barely usable, at least the text area was editable.

Looks like it’s time to make a new theme for my site then. I’d love to be able to minify scripts but it’s always played havoc with my responsive design. I’ll start from scratch and hopefully get something that works cross-browser. In the meantime I’ll ask IE users to stop using TinyMCE.

Hold on there. What do you mean the buttons were ‘small and barely usable’?

It should look like it does here on this site – not so much traditional buttons any more. This is achieved with a font as opposed to graphics. Is this what you are seeing – just smaller?

You will find that 99% of the scripts we load here ARE already compressed as are the ones we utilise that are supplied by WordPress. They can not be successfully ‘minified’ any further.

Hang on, it seemed to be a temporary blip. I disabled then reactivated all WP plugins and the buttons are OK again. They were looking like this (Win7, IE8):

I’m still going to rework my theme from the ground up so the code is as lean as possible. Hopefully that’ll solve any rogue scripts that IE doesn’t like.

Curious – that means that the editor ws not grabbing the correct CSS under Windows. So again – that does still suggest the 32 CSS file limit.

Ok, to pick up on my original issue on the first couple pages of this thread. Easy Video Suite fixed their plugin, so this is not a problem anymore. However I still have a problem with the other issue. TinyMCE shows up in duplicate in the forum and it looks really messy. I deactivated all my plugins, and this did not change the duplication issue. So the problem cannot be in the plugins. The only plugins which I had not deactivated were the SP forum and the TinyMCE so that I could test it out.

So I still have this messy looking and duplicated TinyMCE area in my forum. Since I have a very active forum, this looks very unprofessional and I would really like to get to the bottom of this duplication issue. Do you have any idea what else might be the problem if it’s not the plugins?

Here is a screenshot of my WP admin TinyMCE area:
http://screencast.com/t/8qXyTL0d6psb – It looks nice and clean on three rows.

Here is a screenshot of my forum TinyMCE area – really messy and duplicated:
http://screencast.com/t/x2VvmPzWuG – it takes up seven rows!

by duplication do you mean the bottom rows added by a wp theme or another plugin?  If you disabled all other plugins then it must be your wp theme… clearly, simple press does not add those buttons – dont even know what any of those colored buttons are…

hard to tell anything from an image, but it appears to be adding buttons to rows regardless of where the wp editor is loaded…  If it wants to add them to the wp post/page editor but no where else, it should properly hook in to do that… notice that all the buttons we add on the simple press editor dont show up in the wp post/page editor…  its just sloppy to blindly add them rather than being specific…

By we might be able to do with this erroneously coded theme (or plugin)…

first lets deal with the third row of buttons….  please refer to my earlier post:  https://simple-press.com/support-forum/sp5-general-topics/after-update-cannot-reply-to-posts-anymore/page-2/#p140280  and see if that will indeed remove the 3rd row…

then we can try to work around the other problems the theme is causing…

Regarding the third row of colored buttons – I wrote the plugin author and told him about the possible issue with using the ‘init’ hook when he should be using the ‘admin_init’ hook. Let’s see if he responds and if he will do something about it. I he doesn’t, then I will try the code which you suggested.

However my main issue is really that the actual Tiny MCI buttons show up twice. In your forum they show up nice and neat, but in my forum, as you can seen from my screenshot, every button shows up twice, instead of once, and they take up 6 rows, whereas the exact same buttons (without the duplicates) show up only once in my WP admin and there they only take up 2 rows.

Are you suggesting that this might be due to a coding issue of my theme, which is Atahualpa? I can contact their support and ask them about it although I highly suspect that they will tell me that since the buttons show up correctly in the WP admin, but not in the SP forum area, that the coding problem is with SP. If they say that, what should I tell them?

Everything worked fine before WP 3.9, that’s what started it all…

I dont think the buttons are showing up twice… I think you are getting buttons intended for the wp editor on posts/pages plus the simple press buttons… doesnt look like duplication… our buttons are different… we have our own… we replace the wp buttons with ours…  so think something is overriding that…

I was trying to get you to do a quick temp switch to the wp default theme to see if any different before accusing a theme…  takes like 5 minutes to switch to default theme and see if the editor in sp any different…  then switch back…  but its a huge data point…  you said will ALL plugins disabled except simple press problem remains… so outside of sp, that leaves the theme…  wanted to try to take that out of equation…

havent ruled out sp either, but you are the only one this is happening to, so its still something local… the more data we get, the closer we can come to pin point what is going on…

Ok, I did switch to the default theme, and there is no change. Here is the screenshot of the SP forum in the 2014 theme. Of course the site looks totally messed up but you can see that Tiny MCE is still totally wrong. I guess this means that it could not be a theme issue. What’s the next step aflter eliminating plugins and the theme?

Screenshot of SP TinyMCE in 2014 default theme

I am sorry to say it but the only plausible explanation is that these extra buttons and toolbars are coming from a plugin. I do not even know what a lot of them are except I do know they are not coming from either Simple:Press, WordPress OR TinyMCE – many of those buttons are not standard TinyMCE.

‘Add to Cart’ for example? That can ONLY come from a plugin or some third party source.

Remove those from the equation then we can perhaps see what is left.

It seems that I have not explained the issue well enough. There are two issues here. One is that there are those colored buttons on the last row. I know that they are coming from a plugin and I am dealing with the author of this plugin to resolve why they are showing up in the SP forum. So here the cause is clear and I am trying to work with the author to find a fix.

The second issue, and that is what I need help with, is that the buttons of the TinyMCE editor that I have configured on the WP admin side, show up in the SP forum, not only once, but most buttons show up two times. So for the sake of this thread we can disregard the colored buttons on the bottom row and just deal with the regular TinyMCE buttons.

Here is another screenshot where I show the duplicated buttons connected with colored lines. Those buttons are the same kinds of buttons which show up in your TinyMCE editor on this page of your forum. The only thing is that many of them show up twice instead of once.

Click here to view screenshot of the duplicated TinyMCE buttons

I have deactivated all the plugins, and that did not help. The buttons still show up twice.
I have switched to the default 2014 theme, and still the buttons show up twice. So it seems to me that I have eliminated both my plugins and my theme as possible culprits. What else could be causing this strange phenomenon?

Sorry but I really am not that dumb. I can see for myself what you have on the multiple toolbars because I looked at the screenshot. There is really no need to repeat the same information over and over.

So three further questions.

1. You say you have deactivated all WordPress plugins. Does this include the plugin you know about that is responsible for at least some of those extra buttons – like the ‘Add to Cart’ and coloured buttons? I would like to see a screenshot of the toolbars when that plugin is deactivated.
2. On the fourth toolbar down of your screenshot there is a button with an eye. What does the tooltip say when you hover over that button.
3. On the fifth toolbar down there is a button with a smiley which is the tinyMCE emoticons button. WordPress does not expose that button by default in the TinyMCE editor and neither does SP. Have you turned that on in the editor set up options? And if not – what is causing it to display?

And finally please paste the content of the editor setup options from your forum admin so we can see what they are actually set to show.

Sorry, no offense was intended. Never thought you were dumb. In fact, just the opposite!

1. Yes, this plugin was deactivated. Here is a screenshot of the SP editor with the offending plugin deactivated:
http://screencast.com/t/varwL9kPx

2. The “Eye” button shows up as “Spoiler” when I hover over it. This button does not show up on the WP admin side. However it is listed in the SP TinyMCE toolbar options

3. The Emoticon button does show up in the WP admin editor. I don’t recall activating it. I think WP made it a default option since I checked in another WP installation and it also shows up there.

Here is a screenshot of the SP TinyMCE toolbar options:
http://screencast.com/t/xtB6IPPbQh0V

not trying to beat a dead horse, but is that image will all other plugins disabled?  and the wp default theme running?

is this a live site or test site that can be left in that state for testing?  can we get access to it as wp admin with sp admin caps?  but really need it in the sp only state…

not sure where Andy was going with the eye button question as that is our button…  the button list of what we add in your last image is as expected…