After the WordPress upgrade to 3.3, the admin toolbar vanished on the front end of my website using the Thesis theme. I have several sites in which I use Thesis 1.7 and 1.8 that I’ve had no trouble at all with the latest version of WordPress 3.3.
The first step in trying to resolve this issue, was to switch themes to the Default WordPress theme to see if this was theme related. I made the switch, you probably have also, to find that the admin toolbar works fine with the default theme.
Next, let’s rule out any WordPress plugins that might be causing trouble. Using an FTP Client software, rename the plugins folder to plugins.hold for example. This will deactivate ALL of your plugins, and you will no-doubt see that the admin toolbar is there, back on the front end again! Before you spend half the day long trying to figure out which plugin is causing the issue (like I did), don’t panic, re-activate your plugins, and make sure to back up your database (always a good practice when poking around) and head for the footer.php file and make sure the wp_footer call is in there!
Here’s the path to get there in case you don’t know where that is: /wp-content/themes/thesis_182/lib/html
and at last, you will see the footer.php and also the header.php (I didn’t need to add code to the header.php, only the footer.php). Open the footer.php using your text editor (back it up) and make the following changes.
Upload your changes, go back and refresh the website, and there you have it, the admin toolbar on the front end of your website, like magic, it’s back!
A Happy Camper!!!
Even though I had the comments section disabled temporarily, it was refreshing to recieve an email from someone who gained some benefit to this post! Thanks Len, I’m glad that this post helped resolve your issue with the disappearing admin toolbar.
Hey Mark,
My admin toolbar suddenly went missing yesterday on one of my WordPress sites and I was wondering why. Luckily I didn’t spend hours and hours trying to figure it out. I did some searching online and came across your article “Missing Admin Toolbar WordPress upgrade Thesis theme.” Reading it I recalled that I had just made changes to my footer php file, although I was using a different theme. Ha! Who would have figured that the wp-footer reference in there would affect the Admin toolbar? I put that reference back into my footer.php and it worked. Damn, it must have taken you hours and hours to figure that out! Thanks for posting the information and saving me (and probably many others) all that searching-for-a-needle-in-a-haystack time.
Len @ smokefreevets.org
Owner/Creator of Rightonwebdesign!
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein
