Let’s focus on the Emoticons toolbar button. I am unaware of this being a default WP button just as I also know that WP only uses two toolbars by default.

@mr-papa  – have you seen the Emoticons button on any WordPress installs? I know I haven’t.

Anyone?

And if I am right – as I believe I am – the question stands… what is putting it there?

@mr-papa : We posted at the same time.

I asked about the ‘eye’ because we use it as a spoiler but raw TM uses it as Preview.

I asked about the Emoticons because neither us or WP uses it.

There is only ONE instance of the eye button and that is clearly from the SP toolbar.

There is only one instance of the emoticons and my question remains – where is that coming from?

Mr. Papa, there is a screenshot of this site with the default 2014 theme in post #40.
This is not only a live site, but it is my main and only money site, it is a very active commerce site with the forum being one of the main ingredients. So I cannot leave the plugins deactivated for long or switch the theme for a long time since this could cost me quite a bit of money and grief from all my subscribers and customers.

My main traffic and most of my customers are in the US, so I get the least site access between midnight and 6 am EST.

I could give you admin access, but I really cannot have the site non-functional for more than a few minutes. Personally I have a program which allows me to do localhost testing of the site without affecting the live site. But this is not something which you could access online.

The other issue is that I found out that every time when I switch themes live, one plugin which displays part of my home page stops functioning and I have to do quite a bit of fiddling to get it to work again.

Yellow Swordfish, it seems that the emoticon button is now a default in the latest version of TinyMCE. If you go to the wordpress.org plugin download page for Tiny MCE, there is a screenshot which shows this button. Also I ran a test and installed TinyMCE on a site which did not have it before, and the emoticon button showed up by default.

I understand the screen with default theme… but its not also with all other wp plugins disabled…  really want to see what it looks like with only SP plugin running with default wp theme…

No, we dont want to affect the live site like that which is why I asked about a test mirror or deployment site where stuff is worked on before deploying to live site…  sounds like you can test the requested condition above locally though….

I just ran another test. So far I had disabled all plugins except SP and TinyMCE Advanced. Now I disabled the TinyMCE Advanced plugin in the WP admin and that made the duplicated buttons in SP disappear. Here is the screenshot with TinyMCE in WP admin disabled, but TinyMCE in SP still enabled.

http://screencast.com/t/yyCdQT804zgz

So apparently the latest version of the TinyMCE Advanced plugin itself is the cause of the duplicated buttons. Where do we go from here?

You said you had deactivated ALL plugins.

Where you go  now – to be honest – is to ask the authors of this plugin to fix it. They are almost certainly guity of the same problem – assuming that TinyMCE can only be used in the admin which has not been the case for a long time. Use the ‘admin_init’ hook instead of ‘init’.

I had been under the impression that TinyMCE is used by SP and could therefore not be the cause of the problem. But apparently I was wrong. Actually I had been under the impression that WP and TinyMCE cooperated and coordinated their updates, and that SP uses TinyMCE as well. When you say that SP is using the TinyMCE editor, does this refer to the TinyMCE plugin which turned out to be the cause of this issue, or is there a difference between TinyMCE and the TinyMCE Advanced plugin?

I will definitely contact the author of the plugin and bring this to their attention. I had been using TinyMCE for many years along with the SP forum and it never caused this problem. As soon as WP updated to 3.9 and at the same TinyMCE to 4.0 something went wrong obviously.

WordPress DOES use TimyMCE but this is a plugin that adds extra options to the editor.

WP 3.9 made big changes and upgraded to tinyMCE 4 and many, many plugin authors have been caught out  by this and have not updated their code when they should have done. The internet is a buzz with such stories.

Ok, now this is starting to sink in with me. If I understand this correctly, the regular WP editor goes by the name of TinyMCE, and the TinyMCE advanced plugin is a separate animal which adds more functionality to the TinyMCE WP editor. Did I get this right?

Exactly!  And simple press just uses the built in wp editor which is tinymce… we just show it on the front end…  so plugins have to be careful of how things are added – as do we…  but the wp editor api fully supports using the editor on the front end…  in fact, core itself may start using the editor on the front end (which could get interesting)…

there was an update to Advanced Tinymce plugin a few days ago…  worth ensuring you have latest version….

This is the plugin by Andrew Ozz right?  Oddly just downloaded it and see similar response… which is odd because he maintains tinymce within wp… 

gonna have to look a bit deeper and see what is going on…   had looked it at after wp 3.9 but thought it was working… hmmm…

I dont see that plugin doing anything wrong per se…  Its just adding the buttons to any instance of the wp editor…  unfortunately, I dont see a way to get it to only add its button to a specific instance…  maybe Andrew will have an idea…

but its adding all its buttons to row 1 and 2 like we are…  so some problems…

we could alter priorities and ensure that our buttons were the only ones added… but that limits what some folks can do, but might be required…  he changed his priorities to 999 so now then run after us… instead of before like it used to…

or remove buttons from our tinymce admin panel that are duplicates…

I will experiment with the first one and see if I can still put his buttons in our list and get them to show…

This actually seems to work pretty good…  prevents other plugins from adding buttons to our editor.. but lets you add them if you want to our button list…

some more testing and may consider pushing this out…

Why dont you grab the just released update to the tinymce plugin for SP and see if that helps your situation…  Its an attempt to deal with those other wp themes/plugins that are blindly adding buttons to all tinymce instances instead of just the intended ones…

I just woke up (I am in Asia), read all your posts, updated the TinyMCE for SP plugin, and I feel like it’s Christmas. Everything works, the duplicated buttons are gone, the colored buttons are gone. Thank you!!!

I appreciate that both of you invested so much time and energy to help me get to the bottom of this issue which had been driving me crazy since the WP 3.9 update. The forum is a major part of my business model and to have it look all messy made me look really bad. I am so glad that you found a solution to a problem which you did not cause.