Author information lost after saving node

Question

I am developing a site using Drupal 6. Sometimes, when I edit and save a node, the author information is lost and the node is unpublished.

Some observations:

• When I edit the node again, even with the user 1 account, I no longer get the node publication controls on the edit form.
• In the content overview admin page, the column for author is empty, not 'anonymous'.
• I can force-publish the node again using bulk operations, but not via the edit node page. I cannot seem to restore the/a author for the node.

I have not yet been able to reproduce this problem consistently: it happens on various node types, only sometimes, regardless of using tinyMCE or filtered HTML for content.

It does seem to happen only on edit, not create. I have not recently enabled or disabled any modules.

Has anyone else experienced something similar? Any idea as to what might be causing this?

Answer 1

That sounds strange and like a sideeffect. I would try do debug this using the devel-module. Write a Module and print (with dsm) the $node inside hook_nodeapi. Inspect the content in subject to the operation ($op). Maybe do this two times with diffrent module weights (-1000, 2000) to see if any hook_nodeapi implementation of another module fails.

Answer 2

I seem to have found the cause of this problem in this Drupal issue. Apparently, there's a bug that causes the combination of the vertical tabs module, translations and uploaded files to mess up the node edit form — causing information to be lost.

If you follow the trail on the above link, you'll find there's no real solution yet (although there are core patches).

The best workaround I have found is disabling the vertical tabs module.