WordPress TinyMCE editor Visual editor not showing

Originally posted June 15, 2012

We have encountered a few instances recently where the default wysiwyg editor for WordPress (TinyMCE) does not render in the admin.

We tracked down the problem to a combination of the .gz file extension and git. Usually in your global .gitignore file certain folders and file extensions are set to be ignored and .gz just happens to be one of them. TinyMCE uses a gzipped file to render the editor found at “wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-tinymce.js.gz”. Check to make sure that this file is being included in your git repository using the following command:

git ls-files wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-tinymce.js.gz — error-unmatch
error: pathspec ‘wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-tinymce.js.gz’
did not match any file(s) known to git.
Did you forget to ‘git add’?

If not, add the file using:

git add wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-tinymce.js.gz -f

That should override the global .gitignore and add the file.

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