Brutkey

mcc
@mcc@mastodon.social

My 18-year-old WordPress site started suffering waves of increasing breakage around the year 2020. First, every one of my posts had its special characters (β€”, etc) turned into mojibake. Then, all my posts became completely uneditable as the post editor was replaced with a "block editor" that does not understand my existing Markdown and HTML posts.

I've since:
- Installed the "Classic Editor" plugin,
- Added
define('DB_CHARSET', 'latin1'); to my wp-config

And here's where things get weird!!


mcc
@mcc@mastodon.social

Now the old latin1 characters in my old latin1 posts display right, and the posts created with the old text edit interface can be edited.

But!!

There is ONE POST, which I made last year, after the waves of breakage. I made it in the block editor, containing UTF-8 characters.

Ugh, I thinkβ€”I guess I have to edit out the UTF-8. I go to edit it.

This post can no longer be edited by any means!! All my block-edited posts and drafts are just blank in the editor!! Even if I turn Classic Editor off!!

Jay :nixos:
@jay@social.zerojay.com

@mcc@mastodon.social Maintaining an 18 year old WP site... man, you are braver than I am.