I have a site where content routinely disappears from item records. In particular, the Dublin Core Description field goes completely empty from a (seemingly) random item every few weeks.
I usually notice this and restore from a backup version. The backup version (which doesn't have this issue) is hosted in the same server space, using the same plugins, themes, etc. The backup site is using Omeka 1.5.1, while the production site is using Omeka 1.5.3 (for reasons beyond my control, I cannot update to 2.0+ yet).
So, aside from a malicious or incompetent user, what could be causing this content, from just one field, to disappear? Any guesses?
So you don't know if this is coming from user edits or just happening spontaneously?
Is there anything particularly special about Description in this site? Does it generally use HTML where other fields do not, or have a plugin altering its display or form input?
Well, I don't think it's from user edits. As a precaution, though, I've de-activated older user accounts, changed the passwords for current users, and personally inquired if anyone had recently edited any of the affected items (they had not, apparently).
We were using a plugin that re-labeled the form labels and hid certain fields, though we de-activated that a while back (it was basically just jQuery('input x').hide() etc... nothing that should have had an effect either way).
The only thing I can think of is that it has to do with page load errors in Omeka 1.5.x, especially in Firefox, where the item/edit script frequently fails to finish loading (leaving the tabbed entry form as a flat single page until the user stops the load and refreshes the page). This still doesn't strike me as particularly dangerous to the content and certainly shouldn't happen to pages nobody is editing (which seems to be the case), so I don't really know.
At this point, though, most of the backend is pretty stock. The only plugin that touches the item record form is Geolocation (v 1.2). Can you think of any theme-level customizations that might cause this?
Unless the theme is doing something really crazy (and you'd know if it was), then I doubt the theme could be involved.
Some problem with loading of TinyMCE or the edit form for users who then save that form may be the most likely answer. If it's happening spontaneously, that would seem to point to maybe a corrupt database or some other problem on the MySQL side? Omeka doesn't really do anything that touches the stored item data "on its own."