This morning I went to a page that I designed for a client and all the customizations look like they are gone. The custom fav.ico, header image, the widget layout, it's showing the default sample logo - crazy.

I have no idea how she would have done that. I am having her use the editor password so in theory, she should not have been able to mess something up (although she does have the admin password in her possession).

Right now I am on the phone with the host trying to see if we can restore to before the last time she did any updates but I don't know if this will fix it.

I guess what I failed to do was even though I downloaded the whole site via FTP before I handed it over, I didn't export the Ata theme options settings, so I don't think an FTP file is going to help me at all.

The other crazy thing is under ATO theme options
Configure Header Area

It says the default is this; Default: %pages %logo %bar1 %image %bar2
As far as I can tell all the settings were returned to the default. But in this box it has:

%logo %pages %cats
<!-- To remove the ad altogether, start removing here... -->
<div style="position:absolute;top:20px;right:20px;width :728px;height:90px;">
<!-- Put the ad code BELOW this (and remove the sample text if there is any) -->
%image
<!-- Put the ad code ABOVE this -->
</div>
<!-- End removing the ad here -->

Any idea what might have happened and what should I do in the future to prevent this? I have never, ever had a site get completely screwed up out of the blue unless there was an upgrade going on, and it doesn't look like there was an upgrade.

my guess is that they hit the Reset all theme options' button. You should install the wp-dbmanager plugin for all clients and have it do a database backup (where all the info is stored) on a regular basis

I figured the reset all theme options got hit too, but I cannot imagine why or how. She is not the type to try to mess with the system on her own. I don't know if there is any way to tell if she has used the admin login, but all the posts she has written have been with the editor login, which can't reset the options. I seriously doubt she does anything in there but "add new post."

It makes me wonder if it got corrupted on its own or was hacked. I have never had either problem before. I have secure-wp installed. Just wondering if this has ever happened to anyone else.

I usually use Wordpress Database Backup. Is wp-dbmanager better? It looks like it does a lot more things. You can set an automatic backup so that it works even if no one logs in as an admin?


Thank you!

Never heard of a database corrupting on it's own. If that was to happen, I would expect the entire database to be bad.

Thhe reason I like wp dbmanager is the scheduled backups and you can have them mailed to you.

Oh for God's Sake. IT HAPPENED AGAIN to the same website!
For the life of me I can't figure out why. As far as I know she has been logging in as an editor so she can't access the reset button.

I had exported the ATA settings last time I re-did the whole thing, and easily re-imported them (thank you import/export tool).

Does anyone out there have suggestions as to why this is happening? I have done many WP sites on this same host, using ATA several times and this has NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE.

I don't have time to keep fixing this for free but unless I know what happened I don't want to charge her.