new install toolbar mystery – missing td composer toolbar – wordpress hosting

I am confused as I have never seen this happen before.

I had a client come to me to work on his new wordpress site.
He is mostly familar with wordpress himself and came to me to solve this issue which I orignally thought to be a corrupted install of the theme.
They had purchased WordPress hosting and originally purchased & installed the Nightery theme which uses KingComposer.
The client (nor I) were able to save changes within KingComposer..(it looks too confusing anyways). Nor we we able determine an easy way for KingComposer elements to appear on the frontend once changed. The template just would not save the changes and when it did occaisionally save the changes, it would not be reflected on the frontend pages…and there was no clear path on how to get the edits or push the new shortcodes from Kingcomposer into the pages from the Kingcomposer element creator….so I assumed it was just a KingComposer problem and decided to dump it and try Newspaper as a test.

I convinced the client to let me switch switch to Newspaper since I am highly familair with that and I know it works well and is easy for beginners. His site content wasnt complete yet and his layout is basic so recreating on TD should be a breeze.

Heres what I have done thus far:
( all tasks that I am very familair with from my main Newspaper site)
– Installed latest version of Newspaper from themeforest – successful.
– Installed all necc. plugins for Newspaper – successful.
– Imported a demo as a test – successful.

but upon visitng the front end and logged in as admin and expecting to see the ability to edit pages from the frontend via TD Composer, there is NO TD Composer toolbar.
(additionally there was no admin toolbar on the KingComposer version either, which is likely why KingComposer wasnt behaving as expected).

In fact, the only items that appear in the toolbar on the top left are
“My sites” and “Reader”
on the right of the toolbar are the typical “my account” things.

but no items either from TD nor 3rd party plugins appear in the tool bar.

The back end works fine, the frontend works fine.
TD Composer can be accessed via the pages screen and selecting “edit with td composer” from the page options. where “edit/quick edit” appear. but not from the front end of the site.

I am guessing this has to do with the permanent Jetpack or WordPress hosting setup.
I have disabled all of the previously installed plugins and only using plugs that I am highly familiar with.
(Newspaper plugs, Yoast, Contact 7, Coming soon Seedpod)
Gutenburg is also disabled in favor of the classic editor.
but I cannot disable Jetpack, there is no option for it.
I have disabled many of the usual suspects within Jetpack, but the toolbar issue remains.

I have tried to “login” to the site not using the wordpress.com method and directly going to the wp-admin url and putting my creds in there. Although I can do this it just logs me back in to the unified wordpress.com method.

Clearing Cache doesnt work either.

It is really odd that there would be no toolbar at the top of the site showing the basic things wordpress, Newspaper and other plugins usually put up there, like, Edit Page, Edit with TD, Slimstat or Woocommerce, Query monitor ect ect.

Although the backend loads out fine, there is no toolbar with any options there either.
and Yes, toolbar is enabled in my admin profile, but as I mentioned above the only items that appear in the toolbar are “My sites” and “reader”

am I just dumb today?

Suggestions?
– php 7.2
– wordpress 5.3.2
– Newspaper 10.2
– Influencer demo

OK,
I have tried 20 different methods to get this toolbar for TD to appear and the WordPress.com toolbar to disappear….sadly, it’s just not happening.

What I can conclude from some google and forum searches is that when a site is hosted on WP.com, wordpress business or VIP hosting ect.

Then the Jetpack toolbar MUST be used, it cannot easily be disabled. Jetpack module settings dont let you disable it from the site backend or the wordpress.com account backend. They also prevent you from disabling JetPack entirely.

The only workaround I can find to be able to edit in TD is to go to the page you want to edit and use the “edit with TD composer” from the page edit/quck edit menu under the item. It seems to work properly and the typical TD composer screen appears and accepts changes.

Unfortunaltely this really hinders how admins interact with their site, as that toolbar has alot of features that can be accessed quickly from the frontend. Notifications, stats, monitorign, creation buttons, cache settings ect. It feels like a step back in progress.

if anyone has some insight on how to remedy this, feel free to chime in.

Thats what I concluded as well, not a theme issue.

I explained it to them, they do not like the idea of switching hosts since they think it’s a better system than buying hosting independently “and” it includes all Jetpack’s paid services. It actually is not a bad deal costwise….but it limits what can be done in regards to how admins can interact with the site and the tools they can use.

It’s not just isolated to the toolbar issue either, I have found some other plugins that just simply say “not compatible with your version of wordpress” and they canot be installed. Such as a few caching plugins. Plus on their end, there isnt any sort of hosting cpanel that they could use perform more advanced tasks that WHM or Cpanel would have. and I am not clear on how the lack of toolbar issue affects their guest bloggers or their projected registered users. I just dont trust it and dont like being at the mercy or under the thumb of WordPress / Jetpack proper.

This seems like a great affordable thing inclusive thing for small simple sites, but not for businesses.

So ultimately they have decided to consider switching hosts, but until then the project is on hold until all the data is gathered and approval is given from their team.

Thanks for the reply.

• This reply was modified 6 years by jakobe75.