helpfulwebhosting

It looks like the grey background is made up of three pieces. The top part is made in the header, the main square is made in the post, and the bottom part is made in the footer. I’m not surprised it was driving you crazy – it’s an unusual approach.

A quick and easy way to stop it from showing is to hide it, which you can do with CSS. Add the following to the CSS for the theme, or ideally to a child theme if you’re using one:

#postheader
{
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}

.post
{
background-image: none;
}

#postfooter
{
background-image: none;
}

This will only stop the grey box from showing. It will still really be there in the site, just not visible.

If you know a little PHP and CSS and you’re comfortable editing the theme files (or better still making child theme files and amending those) you should look for and change the code that adds ‘post.png’ to .post, ‘postfooter.png’ to ‘#postfooter’ and ‘postheader.png’ to ‘#postheader’. The theme developer or their own support forum may be able to help you with this if you are unsure.

Sorry Frederick we wiped the old site in preparation to restore a previous version. We don’t have anything in the logs that’s relevant to share.

Thanks for replying Frederick, I know you must be very busy with this upgrade.

We had some more wierdness with this particular account so we’re going to wipe it and restore it from and older version.

If we hit the same problem again when upgrading W3TC on this site after it’s restored I’m sure your advice will come in useful.

We only had problems with this one site, all our other accounts upgraded perfectly well.

Thanks Ron.

Is there nothing that can be done with DNS, .htaccess or some other work-around in either the server configuration or the code?

The requirement to have a couple of alternative tlds for a parent site does not seem too unusual. I’ll put in a feature request.

If anyone else is wondering about this, it turns out that yes, when the URL is back as it should be the like counts come back to their proper values.