A couple of days ago, I had an issue whereby my wordpress had a broken theme layout. Literally any themes I had applied where broken. It appeared that they lost their configuration and what was happening was, instead of the text being on top of the layout of the file. The text was on top and the layout was underneath the file, so basically I had all of the data but the layout was at the bottom of the page under the copyright information.
The broken theme layout, applied to any theme I had applied. I thought I bodged an update or messed up a PHP file without realising. So tried replacing the main root files after a database backup incase it was this. CSS really isn’t my strong point when it comes to websites. Although it was working fine under the dashboard when “customising” the theme (p.s I’m not American – I write it with an S not a Z)
I created a post on the wordpress forums and was helped out by a forum member. The “styling” of my wordpress was infact not being read. They suggested clearing the cache of wordpress
By default wordpress doesn’t have a cache (had to google this to find out), so it was obviously a plugin I was using causing the issue. I think I had more than one cache manager so I just disabled every plugin in my site (not to mention askimet is a hell of a spam guard).
Once I disabled every plugin on the site, the design was being read again. If that didn’t worked I could have done a hard refresh of firefox/chrome and also deleted my temp files / history etc to make sure. I wanted to find out the plugin causing the problem. It was my W3 Total Cache plugin that wasn’t refreshing my database cache. I’ve left it disabled for the moment. I went through every single setting one at a time and re-enabled, disabled them and couldn’t cause the problems to reoccur. So think it could have been a combination of settings.
I think the setting causing the issue was the CDN ones, because I specified to use localhost to statically serve the files, and think it may not have been refreshing properly.
Just thought I’d chip in to see if this helps anyone else in the future