jgstroup

Thank you Joy –

To clarify – the example of added code to functions.php that exists in the link I provided, has the “add_action” call after the new code for defining the function.

As you say – anything outside the function definition will be called when the code in that file is called.

Every other example of functions I found had the “add_action” call before the conclusion of the function definition.

So I was just wondering if the code in the example I cited is flawed and had a bug by placing the “add_action” call outside the function – of if it’s correct in this instant. (and if so – why?)

The link to the example I cited is: https://www.wpexplorer.com/wordpress-post-formats-guide/

Thank you!

mzaheerdad –

Thank you – this is really helpful. It both points me in a direction to proceed – and spawns even more questions. I’ll let you when I’m successful – or need a little more clarification.

Again – many thanks!

I’m new here – so I appeal to the more experienced WordPress community for what’s helpful and appropriate.

I always conduct a through search for answers before asking questions – to avoid wasting time.

And when I volunteer information, it’s because it’s something I suspect is useful to others and I’ve not seen mention of elsewhere.

But no doubt – if the information channels get clogged with less useful information – they lose their purpose. It’s about balance.

Thank you for your reply Steve Stern.

I’m happy to follow the rules – as long as I know what they are.

There are quite a few FaceBook groups regarding WordPress – It perhaps might be something to share there.

I’ve used WordPress for 10 years, but I’m just now getting into self-hosting – and as this increases my need for information, I’m trying to make an effort to find the best avenues to do so.

I’ve participated in many other technical disciplines that make good use of information exchange services. (And some old ones still using listserv.) There always seems to be a distribution of experience levels. We were all beginners once – something I like to keep in mind when I participate.

Thank you RossMitchell – Your documentation links are helpful.

Until WordPress provides greater flexibility in changing the host/site name, the only real caveat is that a developer needs to know the eventual domain name for the blog.

I’m sure it’s only one of the WordPress “gotchas” for a new user to look out for. The silver lining is that dealing with such problems requires a new user to look deeper “under the hood.”

It’s a technical detail that might perhaps be unnecessary for a new wordpress.com user – but surely something for a new self hosting user to keep in mind.

Yes indeed – floating text over images is better. The trick is figuring out which of the dozens of blocks will placing the image exactly where you need it. As it happens – the mixed “text & media” block allowed me to vertically align my image with the center of my text – just like I wanted. Unfortunately – it made the block wider than my site body – with just two options: Wide and Full. Both are too wide. So maybe there’s some other block or technique to use – but I didn’t have it in my hip pocket. I would have just used the image I started with, but the problem with the Japanese translation gave me the impetus to dig a little deeper and learn a few more things.

All of my WordPress sites are just personal efforts – I haven’t offered my services for a fee. But thinking about it I realize that the speed benefit of of WordPress development comes at the cost of some inflexibility (or great complexity working around the constraints) so a client probably ought to be informed up front that using this tool requires accepting that trade off.

I expect a sharp programmer with a catalog of personal templates could create a dynamic website almost as quickly – with only the limitations of skill, and what PHP/HTML/JavaScript can do. I might have to try myself sometime to see for myself.

Thanks Steve – I appreciate your support!

James – thanks for the tip about WordPress updates – I hadn’t considered that.

I like the idea of building my own Plugin. I recall reading about being cautious about having too many plugins. And I like knowing as much about what’s happening “under the hood” as possible. For now, the off-the-shelf plugin for broken links ought to do the trick.

I was looking at the size of the JetPack plug in – it’s huge. I’m not really limited on disk space – but I would like to keep my application as neat and tidy as possible.

Once again – many thanks!

Thank you James and Joy – Your responses together have pointed me in the right direction.

At least one of the plug-in’s in James Huff’s reference is exactly what I was thinking of doing – having a broken link simply return the user to the website’s home page.

When it comes to Plug-In’s I guess there’s the trade off between adding a Plug-In and hacking the core. With the reference to the page loading file provided by Joy, I know where to start looking around in case I want to go the “hack the core” route.

On one hand, it’s nice that the theme I’m using at least offers up the “404 page” coding so I can simply customize that – sort of a minor hack. But it would have been nice if the theme had also offered an option to specify the target URL should a broken link be entered.

Once again – thank you James and Joy for your very helpful response.

Thank you gentlemen, for your informative responses.

It had occurred to me that I’d have to take steps to ensure SSL was handled properly. Of course while on my own machine, it’s not necessary. So I was thinking have simply copying the entire root directory over to the “cloud” host, I could simply apply the SSL certificate at that time – and all would be well.

I’m not all that well versed in SSL yet – so there may be considerations I’m unfamiliar with – and I’ll need to research.

I’d totally forgotten about mail services – thanks for reminding me.

Thank you Joy – yes, that matches my experience using the Export/Import plug-ins. In fact that’s how I came to discover the limitations.

Since I had the original media files, I tried just doing the Export/Import of the posts and pages, and the re-loading the media files on the new site. Oddly, some of my jpeg files were referenced properly, and some weren’t.

Also – I had several places where I created links to other pages or posts within my site. These hyperlinks don’t update.

I got into this because I wanted to move a WordPress site I developed on wordpress.com to my own host to have free reign on development. Its been quite a chore getting it all moved.

Thank you CATACAUSTIC,bg for your kind response. I was hoping I had missed out on some element of documentation that might allow me to easily develop a WordPress site on a stand alone machine using “localhost” and then migrating it to a server when time to deploy. It appears this is not easily accomplished.

In fact, much of the WordPress documentation and tutorials use the example of using “localhost” in lieu of a domain name. It seems to me that this is a Red Herring and a disservice to new WordPress users.

As it happens getting a shared server in the cloud (with a static IP address needed for a domain name) for development is straightforward and inexpensive – and only moderately less convenient than using a stand along computer. The issues only remain are the selection of the domain name on the final deployment – and the expense involved in registering the domain name.

It would have saved me some time had I known that at the beginning.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by jgstroup.

Thinking more about this later in the day, I recalled that when media is uploaded, WordPress stores the location address of the media files in the database using the URL set in the home and site URL. This might actually be the problem I was having with the header image in the Theme on my WordPress site. These database field are not changed with the host and site URL is changed on the General Settings page.

This all might not be a problem if WordPress used relative addressing – and maybe it does, I just haven’t figured out how to use it yet.

Thank you Joy. Yes – I was expecting the WordPress theme to pull the URL for the image header from the database – to allow easily migrating to a new location by simply changing the site and home URL settings in the WordPress general settings. Unfortunately, the theme keeps the header image URL in a separate table record and is unchanged when changing the home and site URL in the general settings.

I considered writing some SQL code that updated all the locations in the database that stored the URL – and I could as a last resort. But it seemed to me that there ought to be an easier way. After all – that’s why the home and site URL settings in the general setting exist.

Alas – even hard coding the site and home URLs in the wp-config file didn’t change the address of the theme’s header image URL.

You may be right about using a plug-in. But I wonder how much standardization themes have that would make such a plug-in possible. Without standardization, I suppose each theme could support migration by having it’s own version of general settings that allow the user to update to the new URL.

By the way – I once make a typo when entering the IP address of the home and site URL. This locked me out of the site without hard coding the proper IP address in the wp-config file to override my error. When hard coding the URL in the wp-config file, the general settings “greys out” the URL fields. So the only way I found to fix this properly was to go into the wordpress SQL database and correct my error in the appropriate field there. Not too difficult – but for someone unfamiliar with SQL and how to make updates directly to the database, it would have been an disaster.