jgstroup

Thanks to all who offered help!

Turns out it was a false alarm – the error was mine.

I didn’t have the XML extension installed – and the consolidated stats that JetPack keeps on wordpress.com seems to need it to access information from my website.

So the errors I was getting were the result of my website not being able to transmit some data (only some, kinda odd…) back to the central JetPack stats database.

Once again – thanks for the kind assistance.

James Huff –

Thanks so much for your kind reply!

As it happens, I’ve come to realize that I really do have a JetPack issue – not a broken link issue.

The Title Not Found report only shows up on the JetPack consolidate page on wordpress.com

The JetPack dashboard on my own website does not have these “Title Not Found” reported. So there’s something weird about how my self-hosted site using the JetPack plug-in is being reported on the wordpress.com statistics section where all my websites’ statistics are available.

Many Thanks!

Great suggestion Steve – I’ll do it! Thanks!

Thank you RoseHosting –

From all the posts I was able to find, it does seem like the PPA/Ondrej is heavily relied upon.

Decades ago, we used to say “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” Even if their products were crap…

I don’t know if PPA/Ondrej has reached that stature – but perhaps it has. I think for now I’ll stick with the Ubuntu repositories – but I may change my mind.

I’m concerned about the package “PHP” (without the version suffix) Doing the “APT SHOW PHP” command – it ends with the line:

“This package is a dependency package, which depends on Ubuntu’s default
PHP version (currently 7.2).”

So maybe the PPA/Ondrej repository has a newer versions of the PHP package, but especially since php 7.3 and 7.4 are in that repository, I don’t know how I’d keep the versions straight.

Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated – Thanks!

Dion Designs –

I’m curious as to what you consider a WordPress “native email capability.”

The only “native” place to enter an email address I’ve seen so far is in a comments widget.

And the last time I tested that it was on a site using JetPack – and the emails sent when comments were placed came from wordpress.com – so not native.

Thanks!

Dion Designs –

From what I’ve observed thus far, I suspect most installations use such third party email solutions.

I’m just trying to be prepared in case there may be a case where using WordPress’ native email capability may be necessary. I was thinking that an example might be when email is used to validate a user when a password is forgotten. I haven’t tried it – but I suspect that function too is sent off to wordpress.com for email handling.

So maybe WordPress doing native email is a rare occurrence indeed.

Thank you for investing so much of your valuable time in your responses!

If you google this specific issue, you’ll find it’s not isolated to any particular distribution – just ones in the Debian family. You’ll find dozens of hits – so it’s clear it was an issue in the past. If it’s not any longer, it’s time to update the tribal knowledge on the topic.

There’s no shame in admitting “I don’t know.”

But its no benefit to anyone to respond “no one needs to know.”

That’s pretty funny – but so not helpful.

To be helpful, it would be necessary to know which distributions, and which Apache defaults. It’s not helpful to be directed to change a configuration file if there’s no reason to do so. In fact, to the best of my ability, I try to understand why any change I make is necessary.

As I recall, the issue pertains to Debian distributions and it’s derivatives.

I’m using Ubuntu – which is a Debian derivative. And I believe I’m using the latest stable release. Can you suggest a way to determine that this update is not required?

Many thanks!

Dion Designs – you’re very kind to invest so much time in your response.

I must have phrased my query poorly – I apologize.

I’m familiar with the material in your response.

My question is if in hosting typical WordPress sites if I’m likely to need to address these details at all.

The WordPress block editor has no email related constructs that I’ve seen – so my suspicion is that any email functionality a WordPress site may have is most likely through a plug-in. I expect only rare cases may entail some custom coding – perhaps on a user developed plug-in or widget.

If JetPack is representative example, I’d expect a third party email plugin to offload the email functionality and resolve the necessary configuration issues. JetPack sends messages on behalf of the user’s website from the wordpress.com domain. I expect plugins that support third-party email like gmail do something similar.

In other words – my guess is that a third-party plug-in with email capability is likely performing the email functions – and not having the WordPress site do the email functionality itself through any of the available local services.

If that’s true – I shouldn’t need to add much regarding setting up and testing email functionality on my WordPress hosts. The exception perhaps being things like background utilities (non-WordPress) that may need to report events.

But if I’m missing something – and there is a likelihood that a WordPress site has native email functionality – I may need to include steps to provide for this – for the reasons of having DNS records properly configured as you mention.

Many thanks!

One more thing I’m a little hazy about – $query is a public property of WP_Query. Here beginning at line 18 of class-wp-query.php:

class WP_Query {
/**
* Query vars set by the user
*
* @since 1.5.0
* @var array
*/
public $query;

But in my usage in my functions.php file I’m invoking the “set” method of an instance of an object named $query – presumably an object of the class WP_Query.

<?php
function my_sortem( $query ) {
$query->set( ‘orderby’, ‘date’ );
$query->set(‘order’, ‘ASC’);
}

This seems a little cyclical to me – unless some helpful guidance is offered, I’m going to have to think about this for a while…

Thanks bcworkz – a good night’s sleep seemed to have helped – I was able to untangle most of this after my second cup of tea this morning. If it hadn’t – your help would have certainly done the trick – Many Thanks!

Good morning Joy…

Yep – I just got to the same reference you mention.

(I must have been pretty tired last night…)

“set()” is a method of the WP_Query class. It’s function is to set query variables.

It’s definition begins on line 1727 of the class-wp-query.php file in the wp-includes folder:

public function set( $query_var, $value ) {
$this->query_vars[ $query_var ] = $value;
}

It looks like there are 40 or 50 methods of the WP_Query class – I’m not sure how many are used in ordinary WordPress programming – but it certainly looks like it’s worth some study.

What surprised me is how few examples I found of complex queries using WP_Query – most are simple things like selecting or eliminating categories of posts.

No doubt my (rusty) foundation in SQL coding will come in handy – more so after a bit of polishing!

Excellent! I’ll take a look at them both. Many Thanks!

Makes perfect sense to me.

Looking at the theme home pages on www.remarpro.com I see the ability to input “add my review” – and “report this theme”.

The most recent review for twenty-eleven is over 3 and a half years ago. The lowest rating is 3-stars – only one that low – and it’s over 4 years ago.

There’s no way to view the catalog of “report this theme” entries – and the submission form says no answers will be provided – questions should be directed to the forums.

I’ll do my part and enter both a review, and report the problems I’ve observed.

I would suggest that the tutorials and textbooks for new WordPress users advise new WordPress users look though the available documentation and reviews – but it doesn’t seem to be common practice for others to raise red flags – so little benefit to that.

Perhaps the best advice is that extensive theme functionality testing be done with minimal content before making a significant time investment in building content.