Seems like many users of WordPress received a nasty surprise when upgrading from an older version to 2.8.  While looking for answers I found plenty of bad advice.  Even more annoying are the WordPress mods rushing to close discussion on threads working to discover a solution.  Luckily, I found a fix through trial and error.  As for the cause, the only blog of mine with this error used an auto-update plugin instead of the new built in WordPress auto update function.  It installed WordPress without installing all the required files.

You may experience the following symptoms:

  • The buttons on the visual editor are missing.
  • The font may be white on white.
  • The image flash uploader button may not appear properly.

The solution:

1. wp-includes/js/tinymce/  should contain the following files:

  • blank.htm
  • langs/
  • license.txt
  • plugins/
  • themes/
  • tiny_mce.js
  • tiny_mce_config.php
  • tiny_mce_ext.js
  • tiny_mce_popup.js
  • utils/
  • wordpress.css
  • wp-mce-help.php
  • wp-tinymce.js
  • wp-tinymce.js.gz
  • wp-tinymce.php
  • 2. I’ve zipped my entire tinymce directory for you.  tinymce-zip  Simply unzip to your wp-includes directory.  Refresh the page by pressing the F5 key and try editing a post.  You should now see all your buttons again.