Hey folks,
I've been learning my way around wordpress by building my own child-theme of Thematic. Everything had been working for a while... I went to change the template used by some of the pages (which I had success with in the past), but suddenly only "default template" was showing in the dropdown.
I figured out that this was because it had somehow reverted to the TwentyEleven theme, but worse than that: my own custom child-theme was no longer listed under "available themes." (I made absolutely no alterations to the file structure or the comments section of style.css; it is exactly the same as it was when everything was working fine.)
The SUPER strange part is that my site was still displaying as if my child-theme was active!! Seriously, WHY THE FACE?! o_0 (This also makes it impossible to know when the problem occurred.)
Unfortunately, I tried switching to Thematic, and seeing if that made my child-theme reappear as an option, which didn't work, so now my site looks like Thematic, and I can no longer continue working on other aspects of my custom style.css until this problem is resolved.
I cannot provide a link to my site because I'm building it locally, using MAMP.
I posted this issue on the WordPress forum a couple weeks ago, where esmi gave me a few recommendations: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/theme-mysteriously-disappeared-in-available-themes?replies=11
Unfortunately, none of them did the trick, and I'm still totally stumped. Perhaps I should have posted it here sooner, but I am now; hopefully someone has some ideas...
What I've tried:
- I tried creating a brand new child-theme, the same way I did it the first time (which had worked), and it also did not show up.
- I tried disabling all plugins, and per esmi's suggestion, I tried resetting the plugins folder by PhpMyAdmin, in order to be certain that they were disabled. (Followed the instructions here: http://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_Troubleshooting#How_to_deactivate_all_plugins_when_not_able_to_access_the_administrative_menus.3F)
- Since then I even tried completely removing all plugins, except for Akismet, which comes built in anyway, and I never activated.
- Also per esmi's suggestion, I tried replacing the wp_admin folder with a fresh copy from the WordPress download.
- Esmi's final suggestion was to "repair your database," which I didn't know how to do. However, I'm pretty sure this possibility has been ruled out by what I tried next...
- As a last ditch effort, I tried backing up my entire site with the EZPZ One Click Backup plugin (recommended here: http://www.carefulcash.com/the-3-best-backup-solutions-for-a-wordpress-blog/#axzz1g3eOhESy), reinstalling a fresh wordpress (again locally with MAMP), and restoring the backup. I figured this might not solve anything if there was something corrupt about the database (as esmi implied)... but I ended up with a worse problem: The restoration didn't even work... so now all of my posts and preferences are wiped. I'm lucky to still have the major work I did on my child theme... but of course, I still can't get the theme to show up in the "available themes" panel.
In any case, now that my database has been wiped, I don't see how a database repair could solve anything (unless I'm misunderstanding somehow), so I guess I've effectively tried all of esmi's suggestions.
Sure hope someone here has some ideas; thanks!
