Conflicts between Cufon module and WYWIWYG module for Drupal

WYSIWYG toolbar displaying correctly

So I was finishing up a site built on drupal - doing all the little clean up activities in order to flip the site live. I ended up needing to upgrade a couple of modules, adjust the caching, and just generally making a bunch of little tweaks. I was just preparing my email to the client to give them the low down on the new site, when I noticed that the WYSIWYG toolbar was not showing up in the node BODY for any content type. As I was just about to walk the client through the site and explain how wonderfully easy and intuitive it was going to be to administrate their site content, the sudden loss of a WYSIWIG environment right at the 11th hour was a bummer.

WYSIWYG toolbar disappears with CUFON module enabled

I had set the site up with the WYSIWYG api (http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg) and the FCKEditor libraries (http://ckeditor.com/download). I really like the flexibility and power of this implementation, though it has taken me a while to get used to all of the myriad pieces and configurations... Such that you must install the module, then install a library, then configure the Input formats (admin/settings/filters) for the site (I always forget to enable the p and br
tags within the filtered HTML [admin/settings/filters/1/configure]), as well as configure the WYSIWG module settings (admin/settings/wysiwyg).

Anyway - Somehow someway I had introduced a conflict into my site which was preventing the WYSIWYG toolbar from showing up. I spent then next 3 hours tweaking setting, enabling and disabling modules, and just trying to get the WYSIWYG toolbar to show up. I reinstalled that module, switched libraries... no dice.

The culprit discovered in CUFON settings

Finally, I was able to deduce that if I disabled the cufon module (http://drupal.org/project/cufon) the toolbar would come back.  The thing is, the cufon module is totally awesome, and I was loathe to remove it from my site. So, I uninstalled and reinstalled and jumped though all of those hoops. I dug deep into all of the WYSIWG settings - and reinstalled that. Stranger still, I ended up looking at another site I had done and noticed that it was running the same versions fo WYSIWYG and CUFON and the same libraries - and that site was working!

Finally, right as I was about to give up, I went back and looked at the CUFON settings and noticed one selector field that had a font assigned to an empty selector. I set that font back to "-----" and... SUCCESS.

Anyway - hours out of my day on one stupid bit of carelessness. As my google searches in trying to rectify were totally fruitless, I hope this post may help people find a quicker solution to a small but frustrating problem.