mahmacc

Thanks for that excellent bit of diagnosis. The plugin was installed by my predecessor but as far as I can see we have no actual contact forms in use. However, I have now amended the settings as you suggested. Many thanks. This thread can now be closed

Thanks for the suggestion. I have done that.

Trying the repair advice. I have added the line suggested but on then browsing to

https://oldmaidstonians.org.uk/wp-admin/maint/repair.php

I just get a box telling me

=========

To allow use of this page to automatically repair database problems, please add the following line to your wp-config.php file. Once this line is added to your config, reload this page.

define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);

===========

I did that but it just gave me that box again. What am I doing wrong e.g. do I need to be logged in somewhere as a site admin to make this work?

Thanks. I already have Add from Server. Further investigation revealed that quite a lot of uploads had disappeared and I have reloaded them from backup so Add From Server may well be useful now. I will also try the repair tool.

Further information. It appears I can save a new file containing just

<a href="https://www.festivalchorushackney.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/flyerp1.jpg">CD conducted by John Andrews</a>

but not one containing

<a href="https://www.festivalchorushackney.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/flyerp1.jpg">
<img src="https://www.festivalchorushackney.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/flyerp1.jpg" alt="" width="321" height="480" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1772" />CD conducted by John Andrews</a>

or anything similar.

We are always close to our limit. I had had to reduce space usage to update plugins and thought there was enough room for the update (which has worked automatically for a long time). I will try reducing further. If that works, that will be good. I do note that the error message refers to wordpress-5.9-new-bundled.zip whereas a simple download from the WordPress site yields wordpress-5.9.zip

Quite so. As the problem had been there for several days, I had to replace ngg with another slider to get things back to how they were meant to be. I can reporduce the problem on my local copy but as I have satisfactory solution (i.e. junk Nextgen), this topic can be closed.

Further investigation revealed that masterslider adds to the output of body_class in a way that makes the background specified in the settings for the slideshow make a solid block of colour covering the other part of the header. The colour was initially set by default to black but was easy to switch to white – but both equally obscure what should be shown. What I want is for masterslider not to mess up the output of body_class.

I am still baffled by this and do not know where to look further. I
am not aware of any difference between the ways the two websites’ local copies have been set up, but one works and the other does not.

I had run with debugging on before I sent the initial query, and I had deleted offending plugins before trying a second time. I have just tried again with debugging on and writing to a log. Almost all the messages (8 of 9) in debug.log concern deprecated constructor methods. The exception is

[11-Jan-2020 08:11:41 UTC] PHP Notice: Undefined property: EasyColumns::$use_custom in /var/www/html/Choir/wp-content/plugins/easy-columns/easy-columns.php on line 233

Of the deprecated constructor messages, 4 concern wp-includes/functions.php, part of WordPress itself, e.g.

[11-Jan-2020 08:11:40 UTC] PHP Notice: The called constructor method for WP_Widget in VMenuWidget is deprecated since version 4.3.0! Use

__construct()

instead. in /var/www/html/Choir/wp-includes/functions.php on line 4716

The other 4 (one from easy-columns and 3 from our custom theme) say the methods “will not be constructors in a future version of PHP”

It’s not obvious that any of these is causing the problem. Removing easy-columns did not fix the problem.

I have uploaded screenshots from my private copy to the public version of the website. Screenshot A shows the (top part of the) dashboard once I have logged in, while
Screenshot B shows what the home page looks like.

Assuming you mean the WordPress administrator dashboard, there
are no errors or warnings to be seen.

Well, reverting to Nextgen Gallery 3.0.8 without changing anything else has removed the problem. Morevover it worked fine up to about version 3.2.20. So the problem cannot be some CSS code restricting height, width or overflow. I am far from an expert on creating or modifying themes (our customized theme was provided for us a few years ago before I took over running it, and I have never written a theme). Nor do I know much about writing css. But I find it strange that without altering anything except the Nextgen Gallery version I get such a different effect – which naturally makes me suspect some problem in Nextgen not in our theme. I shall not update Nextgen on the live website again until I know from a tryout on my private copy that a new Nextgen version will not cause problems. If somebody can suggest what to look at or change to assist in achieving that I would be grateful.

Sorry for the long delay in replying.

I feel sure the problem is not with another plugin because I have exactly the same versions of plugins, themes and WordPress on the active site and my local copy, but as shown earlier the two look different.
(However, I would be glad to know how to raise the nextgen-gallery image
to align with the Supporters images: on both copies the Choir images have slipped down the page slightly. This seems to have happened in the change of Wordpess versions. It was fine before and I have not edited that part of the home page. [I do hate it when software makes working programs or configurations no longer work correctly!])

I can reproduce the behaviour of the active site by copying the mysql database from the active site to my local copy without changing anything else. So the problem is hidden somewhere in the material stored in the database.

Exactly so, but my problem is I have no idea how or why the first occurrence got there, and therefore no idea how to get rid of it. It’s smaller than the desired one and that in any case seems to be not quite in the intended alignment. The change was definitely not something I knowingly did. I have tried reloading the old home page which did not remove the problem. I am checking other ways of swapping old for new to see if it resolves the problem but so far I have found only the one shortcode call to ngg_images in all my files and that one call seems to give two sets of slides…..