I am being a little bit over dramatic, here, but last night I really shit my pants over a WordPress installation that had been upgraded to version 3.1 and I thought I should share.
Apart from here and Emerald City, I also write about comics at Comicdom (sorry, Greek only). One of our sites, was upgraded to WordPress version 3.1 recently and as it usually happens I wasn’t paying attention to the emails our administrator sent me. So, it was late last night when I decided to post something. I logged in, clicked on the “New Post” button and dropped my jaw on the floor. This is what I saw:
In case you don’t see anything weird, there were supposed to be a lot of boxes under the visual editor. I shit my pants. Really. It was late, our admin was probably asleep and I had no idea what to do. I read around the internets for a bit and there were people talking about plug ins that conflict with the new version (as with every new version) and that I should try to deactivate them t0 see if the problem was fixed. Then of course I do not have administrative rights over there, so there was nothing I could do, except clear my cache (as someone suggested) and try with different browsers.
This morning, I was talking with the administrator on the phone and he swore everything was working fine on his end. He tried logging in from two different machines, used both FireFox and Internet Explorer and could see nothing wrong with anything. I still faced the same problem although I was at work, which meant different PC, so I was at total loss as to what could cause the problem. Until I read Otto’s post. I felt so stupid…
Just press the button called “Screen Options” on the top right corner and voila. Check the boxes you want to appear on your screen. The reason behind this, is that with the update, WordPress switched to the default values of every user that had not previously saved their preferences. Mind you, that this goes for every screen that has options, not just the visual editor.
So should you find all your metaboxes missing (this is what they’re called…) just check your screen options before you start tearing plug ins apart.
I still feel so stupid…
RosenRed 
haha I had the same issue with trackbacks, I looked every damn where on the entire freakin internets for trackbacks on my blog posts, reading in depth I now have a full understanding of the trackback protocol and the history of it, but it wasn’t till days later when I was randomly clicking around that I saw the screen button.
damn you screen button!
And the thing is, that WordPress pops up announces for every little thing you can think of, but it did not bother to inform you that with the update, some things might have changed 🙂