NO BUG: A Bricks Page is blank on the Frontend and in the Editor (when the day before it was not)

Bricks 1.7.3

Not sure what happened but my about us page is missing its content on the front end and in the editor (the header and everything else displays fine). Restoring a previous version also doesn’t do anything or display anything in the bricks editor. Looking in the database I can see records for the page and they do contain content so it looks like something maybe got corrupted in the database???

I last edited the page 4 days ago. Not sure if this was a save issue that caused this or not.

All my other pages work fine.

Any idea what is going on or how I can fix it? (else I am going to load a backup on another website and copy and paste the content over)

Okay this is really weird. I restored a backup from before the last save of the page and it still didn’t show anything. (tried different browsers)

I’ve done 3 other restores of backups including one in March which Bricks Builder is v1.7.1 and the About Us page still is not showing anything (in the front end or editor even though the history shows lots of saves) even though this page has existed well before this and I have edited multiple times since this. (the last about 4 days ago)

My host is Cloudways and the restores happened on the same server but different website. I am using WPVivid for backup and restoring the files and database.

I am at a lost of what is happening here as I would have thought a restore would have worked…

Is there anyway to debug this?

There is no error shown in the Browser console after loading the page in the Bricks Editor.

I have all server caching and website caching disabled.

I’ve also disabled all the plugins except for Bricks to see if a plugin was causing some weird issue (it was not)

@timmse

I have also grabbed the latest record I believe from the database. The record for the meta value has obviously been serialized.

If I sent you the record could you see maybe what has gone wrong or do you think it is something else?

Hey Tom,

thanks for your report.

An official support request via help@bricksbuilder.io would be great in this case. Please provide us with some temporary credentials to the site and include a link to this forum thread. Let us know which page you’re having the problems with.

Best,

André

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Okay I was wondering about that.

I have sent an email. I also included a copy of the meta_value column from the table record in a text file (I hope it doesn’t trigger your spam filter or something).

Okay I ended up fixing this issue. At least I got my page back…

I figured it must be an issue with how the data was serialized in the meta_value column of the wp_postmeta table for the about page.

After many tests of pasting other serialized data from different pages I figured out if there is an error in the data Bricks will just display a blank page.

Based on this I tried several different serialize data fixers I found online. This is the one that ended up working for me (a few did not):

I added the serialized data (the code I sent in the text file to the help email) and took the result and pasted it back into the meta_value column and it worked!!!

Finally… I spent hours on this… I was fully expecting at this point to having to redesign the page.

I had also spun a month old backup of this site on another website and I was testing things there as well. The page was a month older but the same fix worked as well on the older serialized data.

What I do not get is that why was it working up to 5 days ago and then everything stopped working. Even more strange is the backups produced the error when they didn’t before and this is on different versions of WordPress and Bricks.

This made me wonder if it was a server thing that got changed at Cloudways. I did try different PHP versions though and it still was happening.

Do you have any insight on what went wrong and how the serialized data couldn’t be read by bricks now in either version I tried (1.7.1 and 1.7.3)?

The one thing that maybe is a clue is that in the intro text of the page there use to be an emoji. It is now replaced with a " ?" which is what is in the text file I sent as well. That’s the only thing I noticed which was different but I haven’t really checked since I don’t have the original page before it disappeared to double check.

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Nice find @Tom , I’m testing this out on an old backup that I ran a “find and replace” for to test out Local WP’s SSL. Bricks and all pages went blank but all the templates and page data is there, it’s just unserialized so PHP errors are displaying on Bricks Editor load. Will see how this goes but good contribution!

If your “find and replace” was for example a SQL statement that change the domain name (and it is a different length than the original domain) then that most likely was the cause of your issue. Serialized data stores the length of the string and if it is incorrect it will cause it issues when unserialized.

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Just a small update. I did find another page just recently that had the same problem (blank on the Frontend and Editor). The page had not been edited for 3 months. This is a very rarely used page so I haven’t checked it probably since the last edit. Anyways it also had an emoji in the content as well.

I went through the same process as last time to fix it. It worked and I also added back in the emoji.

Anyways since this happened to me on more than 1 page that means it was not a one off saving issue.