Theme formatting inconsistent

pages sometimes display with theme formatting and sometimes don't

I will try to describe this as best I can. Sorry if I don't have all the terminology right.

Sometimes pages render correctly with the menu underneath the header and a right side panel with Newsletter, Search and Calendar boxes. Sometimes the menu items don't show and the side bar items show at the top of the page as vertically stacked items with little formatting and more as text. Blocks on the page (poll, news post, etc) lose their formatting and show basically as text. Same with footer.

Somtimes everything shows fine. Somtimes the theme formatting is not applied. (To clarify the same page sometimes will render fine and sometimes not. It seems to happen on all pages and in all zones, such as welcome, site and admin.)

I have not been able to pin it down. It does not appear to be one particular zone, or whether I am signed in or not. So far it seems to be random. I suspect there is a trigger but so far I have not figured it out.

I do not know if it is always the case but it seems like at least sometimes when it works right that this ("&keep_theme=default") has somehow gotten added onto the end of the url.

I was using a copy of the default theme. I tried switching the theme back to the default for all zones but that did not seem to be successful.

I am on version 10.0.47.

Any suggestions on how I may resolve this?
Thanks.

"Sometimes" Always clear your theme cache in the browser "sometimes" it holds old data and other times it does not.

Master Rat has a good suggestion, clear the cache via Admin Zone > Tools > Website cleanup tools. You particularly want to clear Block cache, language cache, theme images, and template cache.

However, what you describe sounds like more than just cache. A cache issue alone wouldn't be causing all these issues randomly.

Please do me a favor. Run through what you did, but do so with your web browser's developer tools open (e.g. right-click and click inspect).

Let me know if you get any errors on the console tab. I'm curious if some of the stylesheets are failing to download.

Thanks for the responses.

On the clearing cache, I clicked on the 4 associated boxes and clicked on the "Proceed" button, however, I didn't see anything happen.

On the developer tools, yes there are errors. At the top it says there are 96 issues but it seems to really breakdown to 8 "issues" in 3 "categories." I could paste a screenshot if that would be helpful but in summary the 3 issues are: (1) there are some Uncaught ReferenceErrors; (2) there are some Mixed Content errors for insecure elements (some say "this endpoint should be made available over a secure connection" and some say that they were automatically upgraded to HTTPS); (3) seems to be most crucial to the issue at hand, it is for Mixed Content and indicates that the page "requested an insecure stylesheet" and that that was blocked.

Next step?

Here is an update.

I added the "&keep_theme=default" to the end of the admin url. It made me log in again twice. After the new log in I ended up at the clearing cache page with the normal formatting. When I checked the boxes on that page and then clicked on the "Proceed" button it actually did proceed and came back with a successful message. When I refreshed the page that was not showing the formatting in another browser it now shows the formatting and all except 5 of the errors went away.

Progress!

Hello,

Yes please attach a screenshot for me of the errors if you can. Censor out any sensitive info if there is anything you don't want publicly visible. I think the mixed content errors are a big part of why they aren't working. Nowadays, browsers will absolutely refuse to load anything over HTTP on an HTTPS website (and for good reason). So if the stylesheets are being referenced as HTTP when the site is HTTPS, that's a problem we need to investigate.

Here is an attempt. Not exactly sure what should be censored but I blurred out the domain name references.

Hopefully the screenshot I attached as a jpg shows up.

If you need something different let me know.

Hmm, you must have an older or less restrictive browser. Those are warnings (not errors which would appear red instead). Thus it still should have loaded them. If they were errors, then they would have been completely blocked from loading. So that's not the issue (though that does need resolved).

Do you have any errors opposed to warnings?

Yes, I had (red, blocked) errors including the one on the stylesheet. They went away when I added the "&keep_theme=default" to the end of the admin URL which then allowed me to access the clearing cache page with the normal formatting/stylesheet. Once on that page with normal formatting it allowed me to successfully clear the cache where before, without the stylesheet/formatting, the "Proceed" button did not work.

Once the clear cache executed and came back with a successful message all of the red "hard" errors that were blocked went away. So, when I refreshed the page that was not showing the formatting it started showing the formatting and rendering the page correctly and all except the 5 warnings went away.

Hello,

got it. So it does sound like it was a broken cache issue after all. Please let us know if it happens again.