Learn With Me 9 – I Can’t Find My Publish or Update Button

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

If you suddenly can’t find your Publish or Update Button, don’t worry. It’s still there.

Your normal Add New Post page should have a right hand column that looks something like this.

If it ever ends up looking like this:

You can easily fix this.

1.) Simply place your mouse over the upper right corner of the box. A tiny little grey arrow should show up.

2.) Click on the Arrow and you should see your Publish control area drop down.

Easy right?  So here it is, two hours of my time condensed in to two simple and easy steps.  Now before you laugh at me for taking two hours to figure this part out, let me tell you how this post came about and you tell me whether it’s me being clueless or WordPress being un-user-friendly.

It was early in the morning and I had just finished writing a post to Publish when my two boys came running in.  My four year old was asking me for Abraham Lincoln’s phone number (like I would have his number in my favorites or something…did they even have phones back then…ahh…too early in the morning to think) and my two year old finds it fun to use my office swivel chair as a merry-go-round.  So in this morning frenzy as I as trying to click the Publish button, I must have somehow accidentally clicked on the arrow.

Ahhhh!!!  Where the heck did the Publish button go?  WHERE DID IT GO!  I didn’t know what to do…I mean how are you supposed to Publish something if the Publish button isn’t there.  I tried mousing over the Publish word, but that didn’t do me any good and how in the world was I supposed to know to mouse over the blank white corner for some arrow to drop down that I would need to click in order for my Publish button to come back if I didn’t know it existed in the first place.

I mean, just looking at the bar, could you tell that you were supposed to click on that corner?  So I sat around, clicking back and forth between the Dashboard, my post and site while trying to get my two boys to eat their breakfast.  I even rebooted my computer and Lord knows how long that takes — especially when you are waiting for it to load!  I was so frustrated I started to click/bang my mouse.  At the final moment, I shoved my mouse away out of frustration.  Ummm…what is that little arrow in that corner that I see?  I guess it so happened to land right on that corner with the little arrow!  I clicked it and here we are this post was born. 🙂  So as you can see, it wasn’t me, right?  Right?

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