During this entire time, however, before and after the troubleshooting and updates, when we go to the https://gourmetcaterers.com website and request a quote for an event; then fill out the form and submit it, the event does not show up under the form entries?
The form on the site is built with the Gravity Forms plugin, which is a commercial product.
WordPress support volunteers here do not have access to any commercial products, so we’re unable to install this plugin and help you figure out where the form entries go.
Please get in touch with the Gravity Forms plugin’s vendor for help with this. They built and sold the plugin, and they should be in the best position to answer questions relating to their product:
Gravity Forms support: https://www.gravityforms.com/help/
We tried troubleshooting that but have not been successful and would like some advice or perhaps an engineer to walk us through resolving this via a phone call.
WordPress is a free and open-source software project that is built and supported 100% by volunteers. There’s no practical way to provide such one-on-one support to the millions of people who use the product (given it’s a free product with no income) other than through this public community support forum.
If you need to work with someone one-on-one to walk you through resolving your problem, please hire that someone from elsewhere. As your hosting provider if they offer that kind of support… or post your job ad here: https://jobs.wordpress.net/
Additionally, we noticed that there are some features that required purchased licenses and wondered if any of these could be causing this issue.
Gravity Forms Environment has a update that requires a license.
As I’ve mentioned above, the core WordPress software itself is 100% free: there’s no paid version.
But the designer may have used 3rd-party commercial addons for some specific feature(s) of the site.
Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing what these 3rd-party actions are and their licensing requirements, and what features may or may not work when their licenses are inactive.
You may 1) Reach out to the original designer that built the site for a conversation about this, 2) Reach out to the individual plugins/theme authors, or 3) Hire someone who you can grant access to the site’s backend to audit the installed extensions and advice you accordingly.
Additionally, they are experiencing a 403 error with regard to the REST API. The are receiving a 403 Forbidden error. REST API Endpoint https://www.gourmetcaterers.com/wp~json/wp/v2/types/post?context=edit
Rest API Response (403) Forbidden
I’m hoping you intentionally changed the dash(-) that should be in the URL to the tilde (~).
I see the site is using the iThemes Security plugin to protect the Rest API endpoints.
But I can’t say if the iThemes Security protection is getting in the way of normal usage or not since the “edit” context you provided requires authentication. But that’s where you could begin your troubleshooting from.
Further, we have this issue regarding an outdated version of PHP. Would this affect the event showing up in the entries? They are running PHP 7.2.34. Is it mandatory to update to 7.4?
“Mandatory” is a rather strong word!
Very few things are “mandatory” in WordPress… there are mostly recommendations, individual choices, AND consequences of those choices ??
WordPress recommends a minimum of PHP 7.4 to work optimally. But note that this is merely the minimum recommendation: in fact, 7.4 is no longer supported by the people who develop the PHP software — so you should ideally be updating to 8.0, 8.1 or 8.2.
Good luck!