If the bar just seems to be invisible, as in there is an empty spacer above your site, then you just need to refresh the page.

I think its a bug within the browser. Only happens to me in mozilla browsers.

are you doing anything funky with domain mapping on your install? If you have more than one domain pointing at a c5 install and you try to maintain that other domain through the editing flow, session can get lost...

As a matter of fact, we are editing on the site with the IP address instead of a domain name, so I don't know that it would affect the session. Also, I can navigate to other pages that have the edit bar, which implies I am maintaining session...although if it was only for that one page...is there an easy way to dump out session information?

Refresh doesn't have any effect, and neither does using different browsers. I don't think this is a client-side issue...

Are you logged in as Admin or some other user? Perhaps its actually honoring permissions in some weird ways?

I am logged in as admin and still can't find a pattern with this. I thought it might be a browser or cache problem, but it's occurring on multiple computers.

Since republishing the page causes the edit bar to "reappear" I thought it might be a variable problem -- something not getting set correctly in the header file or something. My next step is going to be to try and deliberately cause the problem so at least I can pin down when it is actually occurring.

It seems like no one else in the forum is having this issue, so it might also be something funky I've done with the set up.

Yeah, my edit bar disappears when I turn my Theme Forest template into a C5 theme. I think its the jquery reference that's causing the trouble:

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.js"></script>

One by one I inserted the 'getThemePath' into the 'src' and 'href' attributes, and changing that one made my edit bar invisible.

I had read this thread but had never run into this before.

Low and behold, I made my site go from a development directory to the root and POOF, no more edit bar at the top. I can (as mentioned above) go to my dashboard and make site changes there but as soon as I want to go to the "Return to Website", the edit bar doesn't show.

How I fixed it? First off, didn't shred myself. I am like, ok what is not showing correctly. I reviewed first what the site looks like and checked in all browsers. Noticed a funky little something I forgot to change in the Header and Footer php files and I am like, wait a minute, that shouldn't get rid of the Edit bar. Well as iJessup said above, could be a spacer problem. That is a correct statement. Though I didn't use a spacer, my "Add To Header" required something there. Since I was doing this quickly, I had forgotten to change the fully qualified url in my header and footer files. This made the SPACE unavailable. I updated those required lines and re-uploaded those files to my theme file and VIOLA, site is running just fine and I can go into the dashboard and edit edit edit.

Hope this may help anyone that runs into this .

I was having a similar problem. Edit bar was disappearing sporadically and I was frequently being logged out without reason or login screen looped. This only happened after I uploaded the site from my local machine to a shared host. Some of you may have seen the problem much quicker than I did, but it was an issue with session data being overwritten by other scripts on the shared host. I set "session.save_path" in php.ini to a folder in my account directory (not in public_html) and concrete now works like a charm.

I JUST installed c5 and edited my first pages, so I am about 1hr new to this.
What 'required lines' did you update? Was this in the code? I can read & edit php files, have enough programming experience to muck around, but don't know what file in what directory and what lines to muck with?

I see header.php in themes/{themename}/elements - but what would I change from there?

(Editing php.ini is not an option, as I'm on a shared host and they don't allow that kind of thing)

Tnks in advance!

Leland
(getting avatar soon, I may be in here more often!!! :\