I started with a brand new, ground-up install of 4.0 two weeks ago with no problems. Last night I tried to create a new entry, and I found I cannot access the "entry body" textarea box on the new entry screen. The other fields (title, keywords, tags, etc) work just fine. But neither clicking in the entry box with the mouse or tabbing to it will produce a cursor... it's like it's just not there.

What I've tried:
- upgraded to 4.01 (without trouble)
- re-upped all .js files as binary
- cleared browser caches
- restarted browsers

Running Firefox & Safari on Mac OS 10.4.10

I'm about to lose my mind... any ideas?

Possible Fix: see below

I have the exact same problem.

Any tips on how to fix it?

I'd rather have the plain old entry box from MT3 than a useless one in MT4.

This is happening in both Firefox and Safari? Also, what versions?
This is definitely known to happen with the Safari3 beta, and seems to be a problem with the browser itself. Downgrade.

Reports of this with Firefox are much fewer, though, so detailed information on that would be helpful. Have you tried disabling any extensions, etc? If that's a hassle(I use 20+), grab Portable Firefox from PortableApps, and you can test a base copy without actually installing anything.

Ah! After much fumbling with browsers, plugins, and extensions (to no avail), I made a tiny change in my mt-config.cgi file that seems, bizarrely enough, to have solved my problem:

All of the settings in my MT setup point to http://gobecky.net/whatever, I access the system at http://gobecky.net/cgi-bin/whatever, etc...

Somehow, in the config file, the StaticWebPath was set to http://www.gobecky.net/whatever. I removed the www, and all is well.

This feels extremely unlikely, and I'm half holding my breath for it to break again, but so far, so good. But like I said, bizarre, so YMMV.

Becky, could you please confirm the browser versions? There's a fair number of people reporting thing, and frankly, most aren't providing much information, and it's making it really hard to figure out what's going on.

Sure thing.

From my "About Firefox" dialogue:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/2.0.0.7


Here's a screenshot of my extensions (although it should be noted that I disabled them all and still had the issue).
http://beckyblitch.net/storage/ff-extensions.png

As for Safari, I'm not using the beta of Safari 3 -- I tried it when it came out, couldn't get it to do anything, and restored Safari 2.

And in case my system stats help...
http://beckyblitch.net/storage/about-this-mac.png

I have the same problem after just installing MT4. I tested on Safari and Firefox for Mac as well as version IE6 on Windows. No go. Please let me know what needs to be done to correct this. Thanks.

I tried Becky's fix, and it worked for one post. I can not type in the entry body anymore. In fact, when I pull up old posts to edit, nothing shows up in the entry body box... I'm at a loss, and extremely frustrated

So if I re-upload the config file it will allow me to type another entry, but only once. I have to re-upload each time in order to be able to type in the text box.

This happens to me on my laptop, but not on my desktop. Same version of FireFox on both, but different IE. On the laptop, the body entry field is not accessible at all. Also, if I go to widget sets and click the EDIT button next to a widget item within the default set, I get an edit screen with the same problem (on my laptop).

Anyone help with this? I'm really frustrated that I can't blog anymore...

Any help with what? The various people above are exhibiting different symptoms. What exactly are you asking about? What exact browsers are you seeing this in? Did you read Becky's post regarding what worked for her? Did you try it? Did it work? And so on.

Hmm, the way I read this, we're all having the same problem, not a bunch of different ones, but I'll try to be as specific as possible about what's happening for me. I upgraded to MT 4.01 a few days ago and everything worked fine; I was able to write and edit entries with no issues. Today I tried to edit an existing entry, but when I opened it up to edit it, there was no text showing in the box, and I could not type in the box, or get a cursor to appear in the box. I then tried a new entry, and could not type in the box there either. I opened up a different MT 4.01 weblog and tried to edit an entry, but had the same problem. I tried to write a new entry, and had the same problem. I then went to the page itself, did a search, and on my search results page, there is an 'edit' link after each entry, so I clicked one of those, and I was able to edit the text. So I went back to the first weblog and tried to do the same thing, but on that one, the 'edit' links were not there. So I went to the search results template, but I was unable to type in the box to edit the template. Holy crap. That was all with Firefox 2.0.0.8 running on Windows 2000.

So then I opened up my old crappy version of IE, version 6.0.2800.1106CO and had the same problem. So I went to mt-config and took out the www, and tried again. It didn't change anything. So I tried it again in Netscape 8.1 and Opera 9.02 and had the same problem with both of them. The only thing I haven't done is try it on a Mac or on a public computer with a different OS.

All I can think of to do now is to reinstall it and see if it fixes anything, and if it doesn't, I'll have to downgrade to 3.whatever I was using before, which worked just fine.

They really need to fix this, or just switch to a system that is less complex. MT4 control panel looks better, but functionality and speed are poor. I am still having this same problem on my laptop in IE and FireFox, but it works ok on my Desktop.

Bump.

Seriously -- please don't make me have to downgrade; it's going to be such a pain.

A new development -- not being content to sit around, unable to type or edit entries while no one seems to care, I decided to see what would happen if I published an entry even though I couldn't type any text. So I wrote an entry titled "This Sucks -- Movable Type 4.01 Has a Bug that Keeps Me from Typing an Entry" and published it, and when MT returned to the entry after successfully publishing, I was suddenly able to type in the text entry area again. So then I tried to edit an entry, and once again, the text area was empty and I couldn't type in it, but I published it, and it returned to the entry, it showed the original text and I could edit it. So then I tried it with a template, and the template issue was no longer a problem to begin with, but I would guess that you could just save the template and it would then let you edit it if you were having an issue.

So then I decided to see if there was any difference between saving an entry as published or unpublished, because for a new entry, if I have to save it before I type it, it would be better to save it as unpublished, but when I went to create a new entry, the issue was no longer there -- I was able to enter text without having to save it first. So I went to an existing entry to see if I could edit, and I could. So my recommendation to everyone who's having this issue, while it may not be a permanent solution, is to open an existing entry and save it, or save your new entry unpublished, and see if that does it for you.

This is still a pain in the ass if it becomes an issue again. I'm going to close Firefox and reopen it, try again, and see what happens. If I run into the problem again, I'll be back to bitch about it, but at least there's a way to get around it.

I closed my browser, reopened it, and returned to MT, and sure enough, could not type in the text area unless I saved the entry first. Good news is you can save it as unpublished. I don't know if this makes any difference or will help anyone figure out where the root of this issue lies, but when I left one MT blog and went to my other one hosted on a different server, I had to start over and save the entry before I could type in it. However, with different weblogs using the same MT installation, you only have to save an entry in one of them and it will continue to fix the issue when you switch to one of the other blogs, unless you navigate your browser away from MT, in which case you have to go back and save an entry again, regardless of whether or not you logged off.

I checked the issue with the templates as well, opened my main index template, couldn't type anything into it, so I saved it, and then I was able to edit it.

Maybe the thing to do until they get this fixed is to write an unpublished entry and change the entry date to some time way in the future, so it will stay at the top of the list, and just save it first thing when you log on to MT -- annoying, but at least you can post and edit. Or I should say, at least I can -- I'm curious to know if this works for anyone else.

One more thing-- I tried to preview an entry instead of saving it to see if that would do anything, and instead of previewing, it just saved the entry. Then when I hit preview again, it previewed it the right way, and I really like the new preview feature -- I never previewed my entries in MT 3.whatever because the styles were never there, but now I see it how it looks on my page. Nice. But anyway, that's another facet to the problem I'm having, and my guess is the behavior will be the same for a lot of other people.

Still waiting for a fix...

Becky - thanks. You fixed my problem.

Your path has to match the URL you load. I load www.evilprincess.net in my browser and had it without the www in my static path. I took the www out of my browser URL and it works fine.

WEIRD. Kudos to you.

That is really strange; it still doesn't make sense to me, given that I can get around the bug by saving one entry or template, but I checked my bookmark and I had it set to http://my_url/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi; I added www and sure enough, everything was fine. I wonder why this was never an issue in previous versions.

No idea. I'm just thrilled to have my blog back!

I'm having the same problem and have tried reloading mt-static, done the various suggested workarounds with mt-config files, but still can't post. I'd appreciate any suggestions.

I'd been having this problem, and couldn't find out for the life of me what the problem was.

After hours of agonising messing, I discovered that Movable Type wasn't finding this file correctly.

mt-static/html/editor-content.html

In my case, it was because I had a bit in a .htaccess where all .html files got renamed to .php instead.

Once I'd changed that, this worked. I'm not entirely sure if the above file was the one breaking everything, but it's worth checking out your own systems to see if something like this is the problem.

Hi there. I figured out how to fix it, at least I think so. upload the MT-Static folder from the previous MT and it could work, meaning, don't use the old MT Static. I'm not sure if it will work with the new style sheets - might have to revert to those but it is definitely an MT Static, template, style issue.

I have seen this when the url used to access the page is different from the url listed for the CGIPath in mt-config. Note that www.domain.com/mt/ and domain.com/mt/ are treated as different urls even though they may end at the same place.

In my case the problem was that contents of the "mt-static" folder was from a different version (mt4.1 vs. mt4.01). When I copied the correct mt-static, I was able to see the text.

I think I might have solved this problem. As earlier posters have said, it does indeed have something to do with your URL paths in your browser matching the paths in your MT setup. I did three things.

First, I made sure that the site URL and archive URL paths in Preferences > Blog Settings were the same. In my case, I chose to remove the "www" subdomain from each, e.g.: http://bostonconfidential.org and http://bostonconfidential.org/archives.

Second, I used my FTP program to go into my MT folder and open up mtconfig.cgi. I again made sure the CGI path url and the Static Web Path were identical as far as the "www" subdomain being absent. (You could also obviously choose to leave the "www" in; the paths must either all have it, or all lack it).

Finally, I accessed my MT Dashboard through my browser (I use Firefox), making sure to type in http://bostonconfidential.org, NOT http://www.bostonconfidential.org. As long as I remember to access my MT installation using the URL without the "www", everything works fine. This seems to solve both the problem of the entry body text area being inaccessible during creation of a new entry as well as during editing of previously saved entries.

Like every other suggested fix in this thread, this is a quick fix. I don't pretend to have any idea why a discrepancy in the presence of a "www" subdomain or a lack thereof among URL paths of the mtconfig.cgi file, the blog settings, and the browser should make such a big difference, but it does. If you decide to remove the "www" subdomain from all your paths, just make sure whatever browser you're using doesn't try to automatically insert it when you type http://yoururl.com into the address bar.

This glitch makes Movable Type completely useless, and even though you can get around it with this hack, I don't understand why SixApart hasn't been more on top of things. It's obviously a problem quite a few people share.

Update: I just noticed that OtherNiceMan said essentially the same thing before I did. In any case, I hope my post summarizes the fix.

It is a web browser problem. Your login 'token/authentication' is stored in a cookie, for security reasons sites can not access cookies that belong to another domain / server and as far as the browsers are concerned they are different servers and so blocks access to the cookie, MT can not find the cookie so can not determine what rights you have in the blog so by default stops you from doing anything.

THANK YOU SO MUCH! i also had this problem and had a RewriteRule in my htaccess file to do the exact same thing. now it's fixed after i took that out.

This happens to me too. VERY VERY VERY frustrating.

Running Firefox 2.0.0.12 running on a Windows XP box, no extensions.


WTF BBQ?

This should probably be a HIGH PRIORITY bug for the team as it completely destroys your ability to post.

When the problem is related to you accessing the blog on a different path to the path that is specified as your CGIPath it is not an MT problem but a Browser security issue, Browsers are not allowed to accept cookies from another site so MT can not authenticate you properly so you edit an entry.

I'm glad to hear y'all talking about this, because I thought I was going crazy. For me, I am seeing the following behavior:

1. Create new entry
2. Type first paragraph into Body
3. Switch to Extended. Text I entered into Body appears rather than empty.
4. Enter remaining content into Extended.
5. Now Body shows Extended content.

Changing the content in Body or Extended changes the other. Existing entries that I want to edit seem to display correctly; however, I do not want to perform any edits for fear that the posts will be corrupted.

Is this similar to what some of you are seeing?

UPDATE!
I have managed to fix the problem by comparing the mt-config files between an older blog of mine and the new one. I found the config files had changed in 4.1 by specifying full http paths for the both the CGIPath and the StaticPath.

In the older 3.x blog that I upgraded, it was not a full path. it was /mt/cgi-bin/ for the CGIPath and /mt-static/ for the StaticPath.

I changed my new fresh 4.1 blog config file to these paths and VOILA!, the editor worked correctly.

I did find; however, that there are still some anomalies. For example, I configured the new blog to have the action bar (Save, Delete, etc.) on BOTH (top and bottom) and nothing changed.

In my older blog that started with 3.x, this worked fine.

Note: The Entry boxes for Body and Extended do not work properly in Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 on the MAC.

Hope this helps!

Regards,
Rob

THIS BUG SUCKS

very helpful post, i know. but i am very very frustrated with this.

Hullo there, I also have this problem. I'm running MT v. 4.1 on a Mac running 10.4.11, and have had the exact same problem in Safari 3.1.1 and FireFox 2.0.1.11. I can't click or see any text in the post area. When I click on the Extended Post tab I get no response. Also, my categories aren't showing up, and when I click on the little edit button over there I get no response. I've tried republishing / saving as folks have suggested but that hasn't helped. I'm going to try these config changes to see if that helps, and will post if I get any positive results.

Thanks to everyone else here for posting your solutions... Six Apart, where are you?

The most funny thing was, this bug actually triggered when I was doing a presentation in front of 10 people.

I had to quit the whole presentation, as I could not get the backend scripts to work (like attach files to posts), until I have found this thread the day after.

It was so nice and I looked so stupid. Lucky me, they were my friends.