I just upgraded to Salient v 5.5 and I loaded the home page, and all the Visual composer shortcode is showing up as text on my page.

What do I do?

HURRY!

I looked in the "plugins" folder and noticed that the VC plugin was in zipped format. I've unzipped it and waiting for it to upload .

That does not seem to have been the solution. What do I do?

I rolled it back to the prior version. I'm now wondering what I need to consider before attempting to upgrade.

Thank you,

Mitch

Fortunately I created a "Salient Sandbox" sub-domain on my server where I can test things before I integrate them into my main website.

You need to unzip the Salient theme on your computer somewhere (I just did mine on the desktop), and then go into your WordPress dashboard and go to the Plugins folder. Click on the "Add New" button and then go to that same "Plugins" folder you mention from the Salient Theme unzip and add the plugin from there.

You may also need to go into the "Settings" tab in the WP Dashboard, and go into Visual Composer and click on "Administrator" in User groups access rules and choose "Select All" to add the VC elements back in as options.

Disclaimer: I'm not a ThemeNectar employee or anything, just a Salient user... so this may not be the "official" solution.

Okay. So... it seems the previous version kept the Visual Composer plugin in a folder called "wpbakery" and this latest version seems to have moved it into a folder called "plugins" (inside the ...wp-content/themes/salient folder, of course - not the same folder that is the ...wp-content/plugins folder)

So... I guess I'll need to change the new version's "plugins" folder to "wpbakery" and then it will work?

Thanks,

Mitch

I don't know about that, but what I did (which I usually do when upgrading) is I logged in to my server via FTP and I went into wp-content > themes > salient and I deleted everything in there. Then I unzipped the new salient update and uploaded everything into the same 'themes' directory.

That way I was working with a "clean" version of Salient. After that, I logged into my website (sometimes you may need to clear your cache first), and then went into the plugins folder and completed the steps I outlined above.

I was also able to successfully install Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer which worked fine as well.

My problem is that I own the raw Visual Composer plugin which I used to be able to disable the Salient version, but that option is gone with 5.5. I have opened a separate support ticket for that issue though.

Hope this helps you!

Thank you, John.

Yes, I usually do updates on my dev installation first but i didn't do it this time. Dumb move.

Also, I don't recall having to treat the Visual Composer as a separate file to be installed like any other plugin. As a matter of fact, this rolled-back version reminds me that VC is not even listed among my plugins. I don't get how it's working, but it's working. It sits inside the "wpbakery" folder, but how does that even work?

So, if it's working as such, then my guess would be that if I want to update, all I need to do is to change that inner "plugins" folder's name back to "wpbakery" and then delete the current "salient" folder from my wp-content/themes folder, and replace it with the new one.

I'm not going to try it on my live site. I'll test it on my dev site first and let you know.

Thanks again,

Mitch

And the other thing I did this time that I never did before, was to download only the "installable files" and not the entire package.

I went back and downloaded the entire package, unzipped it, and found the READ THIS FIRST file. So, yeah. There's that.

I read the "READ THIS FIRST" document as well. My guess is that they wanted to make it so they could update the custom Visual Composer plugin without having to update the whole theme.

As an owner of the raw Visual Composer plugin, I can tell you that they update that thing about every two weeks, so it has to be a pain in the butt for developers like ThemeNectar who include a version of it in their theme.

In the past, I was able to turn off the custom Salient Visual Composer and use my own, but with this change of 5.5 that seems to have gone away. That is a very big deal for me because if you look at the raw Visual Composer plugin features, there is a significant amount of advantages to the raw plugin.

Thanks for your input on your methods, because maybe that will help me solve mine.

I'm screwing around now with my newly updated development version. I successfully updated the theme, and I installed the VC plugin just like any other plugin (whereas it had been baked right into the theme prior,) and now I'm having many, many little bugs all over the place.

My full-width sections are now in container, and yet re-setting them back to full-width doesn't work; and the 3 columns that used to have icons with hover effects now no longer have the hover effect; and the portfolio items I painstakingly made with background images and animated slide-in panels no longer show up at all; and; and; and; I could go on and on.

So, instead of updating the live version and having to iron out all those problems (all over the place,) I think I'm going to wait for "ThemeNectar" to come respond to this ticket.

I'd sort of hope I don't need to make separate tickets for every single one of the many, many, many issues I'm having.

Aggravating!

Not happy

Thank you, Tahir,

I see what needs to be done, and the only thing that will keep me from it is that my child theme (my own,) has all sorts of customizations which will break the site if I'm not using it.

I'll play around with my dev version, following the instructions you've provided, and see how it goes. Hopefully my child theme can be used after the update you mention.

Thank you again

Mitch

I was having all kinds of VC problems too, I updated to 5.5.2 and still problems. For me, VC was completely gone, like it wasn't included in the update anymore.

I went back to version 5.0 and everything is working fine now. That's what I suggest you do.

Good luck - David