hamstair_toilichte

Yep, same here. The silence from the developer is positively Trappist. I don’t want to ditch Gmedia as I’ve uploaded a shedload of pix but I’ve struggled with the plugin, and the plugin has struggled with my WordPress, and, worst, with the JPGs I’ve tried to upload. Ah well, live and learn. Time to go to a premium paid photo plugin that has some support for your money.

Thanks for the reply, Rattus. I guessed that there’d be no manual, but I am very disappointed at the lack of a search, as I’m putting serious effort into XMP and IPTC metadata tagging of my photos. Ah well, it’s only 29 bucks so no great loss.

I second the UI frustration, having wondered where the flip the handles had gone – they’re mentioned in the vid tutorial which I’m following to try to wrangle 2020 into one of those designs it’s supposed to be able to make. I’m not against the block editor move, but it feels like I’m wrestling with an octopus in jelly. I understand why some designers have gone old skool with ClassicPress, not a route I’d follow as I like to stick with the main path.

Anyway, I’m glad I found this thread, though I had to sherlock somewhat over a half hour, as it’s removed my frustration.

Thanks, Tyler, that’s a good point, and I think that you’re very likely right that it’s a hosting company feature. I’ll check with them. It did seem strange to me that it’d be built into the WP code. The company (123-reg) has snuck in the occasional ‘undocumented feature’ on these and other sites.

Thanks for your reply too, Steven. A manifestation is at https://www.stlawrencechurchthorntoncurtis.org.uk/wp-login.php .

It’s definitely not important or a problem. It did make me chuckle when I got presented with a captcha on logout ??

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by hamstair_toilichte.

Good point, John, thanks. I’ll check with my hosting provider as I used their ‘one click’ WP install. I’ll be a bit miffed if they did this, though I suppose that if I wanted complete control of WP I’d have manually installed it via FTP and web script.

Thanks for the reply, James, that’s what I thought. I’ve installed the 2020 Options plugin which looks like it can do most of the customisation I want, although slightly annoyingly it’ll hide the title ‘block’ but not remove it so a lot of space is left behind. Thanks for the tip about Twentig – I’ll have a play with that and see if it’s better.

No apologies needed, Richard. Thanks for replying to a non-paying customer ??

If the classname is just registered in one line of code then sure, that’d be easy enough to tweak. In your previous reply, though, you wrote “there are a few locations the change would need to be made” which put me off a bit. Do please point me in the right direction, and I’ll give it a go. We don’t need random testimonials so I can do without the class altogether.

I wasn’t aware that namespaces were a big thing in the latest PHP versions – live and learn. Mind you, I only write lightweight scripts these days.

Thanks for the comeback. Yes, I figured that must be the case, and the theme with its testimonials functionality would be the most likely culprit, so I was surprised when a grep of all the site files for randomTestimonialWidget came up empty. Mind you, I had to grep from the hosting account cpanel, as there’s no shell access to the account as it’s on a shared server.

My knowledge of WordPress plugin and theme development is at beginner level. I thought that each plugin only operated in its own ‘box’, so that any classes and variables would be seen only by that plugin, but clearly that’s wrong.

I doubt that this problem is a ‘bug’ with your plugin, as if it were a search for the error would have harvested a heap of hits, rather than just one. Plus your plugin is very widely and successfully used, so it’s almost certainly a problem with my site and its theme. I just posted here in case the problem might have rung a bell with someone.

I’ve now deactivated all plugins by renaming the wp-content/plugins directory, as advised by this article, and now the site works and I can get to the Dashboard. I guess I’ve now to go through the tedious business of re-activating plugins one by one. However, the problem was definitely caused when I was updating Jetpack and another plugin (Ninja forms I think), and the Jetpack update hung.

I’ve now deactivated all plugins by renaming the wp-content/plugins directory, as advised by this article, and now the site works and I can get to the Dashboard. I guess I’ve now to go through the tedious business of re-activating plugins one by one. However, the problem was definitely caused when I was updating Jetpack and another plugin (Ninja forms I think), and the Jetpack update hung.

It turns out that the problem was caused by the hosting company, “issues with migration”, upgrading MySQL and PHP versions, so it looks like your option b), Jesse, was the cause as they must have ‘lost’ the database. Oh, well, at least they fixed it quickly, and there wasn’t a hack.

Thanks again for the helpful replies ??

Thanks to Jesse and Marco for the replies.

Jesse: I’ll check out your option (a). I’ve got BackWPUp set to carry out weekly DB backups, and monthly full site backups. If this problem recurs I’ll look at the DB first via phpMyAdmin as you suggest. I’ll also have a proper neb in wp-config.php.

Marco: the hosting company, Catalyst2, are very good when it comes to customer support and hack fixing. In this case, they responded to my friend’s support call by restoring the site from a backup.

Thanks, Ross, that’s very helpful and much appreciated. I’ll take your excellent advice on board. Is your Genealogy Wiki in the WP Plugins Directory? I wouldn’t mind seeing how you’ve coded it as that might save me a bit of time coding from scratch, as I’m pretty new to plugin development.

Jon, I see what you mean about hosting leading to barneys – I just searched the Codex for ‘hosting’ and got scads of hits and more than a few threads that were summarily closed by moderators. There’s a page on hosting which lists just the three hosts, which I’ll investigate. The thread “Is WP optimized hosting worth it?” is interesting, and managed to survive the moderator guillotine.

Automatic daily backup can be helpful. And, if you know what you are doing with it, SSH access is useful for both command line Linux commands and, more important, SFTP access via FileZilla or equivalent FTP client.

Yep, I’d agree with both SSH and SFTP being highly desirable, but it can be easier to get blood from a stone than to get SSH access, at least with commercial hosts I’ve dealt with.

Thanks very much for the replies, which are interesting and helpful, and indeed encouraging. That Playground site loads pretty quickly, and I’d never have twigged from the speed or interface that it was running on WordPress, so that’s encouraging. I’d like to stick with the WP platform if possible, if only because I know it so well now that I’ve spent years on it. Plus I’ve written a fair bit of user documentation which I’d like to recycle, and content editors are usually ok with the editing interface once they’ve got over their initial trepidation.

I take the point about servers. My WP sites run off standard general-purpose hosting accounts at Titan and Namesco. I believe that there are hosts that claim to be ‘Worpress-optimised’ but I’ve tended to take such claims with a pinch of salt. Are there some such hosts that really are what they claim? I’d expect that a fast server would need a pretty speedy MySQL server as WP runs stacks of queries per page.

I’m sure I’ve seen something on the Codex or on wordpress.com listing WP-specific hosts, so I’ll hunt that down when I get a bit of time over the holidays.