During a WordPress website migration to a new server I recently had a bit of a nightmare, when all of a sudden I could no longer add new pages to my WordPress site, as there was no “Publish” button. The ‘Publish’ button had be replaced by a “Submit For Review” button.
If you ever have this problem I hope my following tips will help you fix your WordPress website fast and getting you blogging again! (Number 4 was the complex fix for me!)
- Third party themes can cause this problem. I recommend you switch back to a default theme (i.e. twenty eleven, twenty twelve etc.) and test if the problem persists.
- Third party plugins can also cause this problem. To verify if this is the problem, I recommend temporarily moving your plugins to a directory outside of the folder wp-content and see if the problem persists.
- Login to your PHPMyAdmin and repair the database tables. This can solve the problem on some occasions.
- The WordPress “Publish” button is a “Submit For Review” button problem can also be caused my not having a ‘Primary Key’ and ‘Auto Increment’ in the wp-post table in your database. You might ask ‘How can this happen?’ No idea, but this was my problem and here is how I fixed it.
Please note, if you are not happy editing your database manually, then you may want to hire someone to do this for you.Login to your PHPMyAdmin and go to the table wp-post. You will see the following error, suggesting that there is no ‘Primary Key’ nor ‘Auto Increment’.
Go to ‘Structure’ and on the ‘ID’ row, click on ‘Primary’ to make this this primary row. Once the ‘ID’ row is the ‘Primary Key’ you can then edit the ‘ID’ row and add ‘Auto Increment’.Unfortunately, I had a bigger problem, as there were some duplicate entries of ‘0’ in my ‘ID’ row, therefore this could not be a ‘Primary Key’ or ‘Auto Increment’ until the problem was fixed.
Due to not being able to edit the database, the only way I found to fix this was to download the wp-post table, open the sql file with Sublime remove or rename the duplicated ‘0’s in my ‘ID’ row and then upload the table again. Once I had done this, I was able to make the ‘ID’ row the ‘Primary Key’ and then add the ‘Auto Increment’.
