the travel writer

Hi Kat

Thank you for your apology. It is just a pity that I trusted others here on www.remarpro.com thinking that they were the experts. I will be much more careful in the future.

As for my site – I will not take up your kind offer as I have already started the long process of deleting the images that have foreign characters and replacing them with English spellings. However, I am now left with hundreds of pages that have broken image links which will take some time to fix.

It is time that WordPress updated the CMS software to allow for foreign characters in image files considering many of the worlds languages use different letters to us English speaking nations.

I will most likely go back to a HTML static site once I have sorted the WP one out.

Unfortunately, I am now having problems with restoring my site which is over 2500 pages in size.

The backup Plugin may be the problem, not sure but I have now decided to look for a HTML template and start the long process of transferring it to a static site.

I transferred from Joomla to WP because of migration issues on version changes, now I am sadly experiencing the same problems on WP.

With static html sites I have no such problems and due to the editing issue, I will now have to copy the pages code from WP, edit it using an external editor and then paste it back into WP. I might as well do it all on a static site. Google search perfers static sites over CMS.

I deactivated all pluglins and made the Twenty Fifteen active but it made no difference.

I have now lost the settings for the former theme and will have to restore a backup!

As you can imagin i am not very happy at the moment.

Whatever is doing this it does not seem to be the plugins.

I will have a go at doing what you advise but this was not a problem until I updated to the latest update (4.6).

So WP has changed something that now makes this happen.

No problem Andrew and thanks.

I have learned something that I never knew before, that WP offers minimised files in the core system. If we all work together we can continue to make WP great going into the future and help each other.

That is what WP is all about, and that is why so many use it.

If you look you will find minimize versions of files in the source code. Just look in /wp-admin/js/ or /wp-includes/ and you will find (does a little check) 217 minified js files. For CSS you will find…120 files.

Must admit, I had no idea that these minimised files were included in WP core files. What a good idea but how many know about it?

I take it that we can simply replace the full version with these minimised ones, if we wish too.

There is zero advantage to minifying PHP files.

I have removed unused lines in PHP files and my site is running smoother by doing this. Pages are loading a bit quicker but this maybe because I am looking at all the files and going through the process of removing empty lines of code in all my files.

There has been much talk lately about Google’s new search criteria (since April) and that a number of sites have lost their search position. This is largely to do with sites being mobile friendly, but as those of us know, that take our sites seriously, this is also to do with the size and speed of loading pages for mobiles. I can get 25mb speed using a well known cable network at home but when i come to view my site using a mobile phone it takes ages.

I think WP is a great platform and use it lots, but there is no doubt in my mind, that when I set up a static html site it loads much, much quicker than any CMS (including WP, Joomla, Dupal and others) I have come across, every time.

That is why I am suggesting that the WP community looks into adopting any measure that can improve the size and speed as search engines like Google are demanding smaller sites that fit in with mobile communications.

Please do not misunderstand me, WP is a great platform and many people give their time and effort in making it what it is, but the web is always changing and WP cannot afford to stand still.

Thank you to all those that contribute to WP.

That I consider to be a rather rude reply Andrew.

Hi Andrew

I think you are missing the point. If all coders did it across the web it would make a large difference.

I know there are plugins available but why have another plugin to do what good practice should be doing anyway.

If you are concerned about adjusting code (developers) this could be easily solved by providing a link to a developers version. The production version should have whitespace removed.

Doing it on my own site makes a difference.

Let me provide you with an example: –

the “themes-rtl” file in admin/css – before line removal the number of lines is 1761, after removal 1535. If my maths is correct that is 226 of empty lines just sitting there doing nothing but taking up server time.

Hi George

So far every thing seems to be in order.

thanks for all your hard work.

Hi George

Just so I understand what you are saying above, In the latest version 2.8.0 do we replace the former code in the themes functions.php with the revised code above?

thanks

Hi George

Placed your code in the theme functions.php and noticed the following.

When “Automatically generate the description meta tag.” and “Automatically generate the keywords meta tag.” are both checked on your plugin custom description and keywords placed on the page work fine and those pages without show nothing – just what I wanted- fantastic.

If you uncheck “Automatically generate the description meta tag.” and “Automatically generate the keywords meta tag.” no description or keywords will show on any page. In other words it will remove all descriptions and keywords.

A great bit of code and many thanks. Problem solved as far as I am concerned.

Hi George

Thanks for your quick response.

If you have any temporary code fix I would be very grateful to know it as I have over 1500 pages on my site (which I have just transferred to a new url). Most of them are showing some very strange meta descriptions.

This is where WP (indeed most other CMS) is/are OK for blogs but not so good when it comes to serious websites such as mine due to the minimal control you have in the code for individual pages.

WP is great in what it does, but it certainly has it’s limitations which is why I may decide to revert to good old HTML as you can have total control on what displays on the static page and if you wish to use separate template designs within a site, (something that is almost impossible to achieve with any CMS) it is easy to do on a HTML site. Try using 1500 unique page designs with a CMS site!

Thanks again for your plugin, I am sure many others benefit from your hard work.

Ok – this is how I resolved the issue if others need to know.

1. I had the “W3 Total Cache” plugin active when I did the backup, this i had to disable in “wp-config” by using an editor and removing the lines

“/** Enable W3 Total Cache */
define(‘WP_CACHE’, true); // Added by W3 Total Cache

/** Enable W3 Total Cache Edge Mode */
define(‘W3TC_EDGE_MODE’, true); // Added by W3 Total Cache”

2. I did a fresh install of WP (using the version of the backup) and used the same database settings as the backup, (from the wp-config file)

3. I then reloaded the backed up files using FTP and overwrote the db with the backed up tables.

Hope this may help others.