Today I finally clicked the auto-upgrade button to upgrade my WordPress site to the newest version, 3.0.1. I then noticed that I wasn’t seeing the content of a lot of my pages. I could still see the lists of posts but I wasn’t getting anything on a single post or normal page. I verified the data was in the database.

Here’s what my page.php looked like:

<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="pageWrapper">
	<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
	<?php the_content(); ?>
</div>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

This was all fine and dandy for WordPress 2.x but obviously wasn’t working for 3.0. Turns out the solution is quite simple. I just need to put the_content() back into "the loop":

<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="pageWrapper">
	<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
		<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
		<?php the_content(); ?>
	<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
</div>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

I’m not sure why the change but I suppose I should have always explicitly used "the loop". Maybe I was taking advantage of a bug this whole time? Or maybe this was an intentional change that I should have seen coming. At any rate, if you see your content missing after an upgrade, take a look at your theme and make sure the_content() is always inside "the loop".