Robert Gadon

After presenting this issue to a recent WP meetup group in my community (St. Louis, MO, USA) and observing the responsiveness of the Twenty Thirteen default banner (expands and contracts depending on the size of the display screen), we concluded that a better solution is to switch to a different theme. Any custom banner introduced to Twenty Thirteen’s header appears to ‘float’. It’s not anchored to a particular point from which to scale the image larger or smaller. Hence, the ends of the custom banner get cut off. I’m sure this was a deliberate design feature built into the theme. Better theme choices might include Twenty Twelve or Responsive, a free responsive theme offered through WP.org. Both of these themes seem to visually anchor a custom banner to one spot, and retain the width of the banner when the screen width scales larger or smaller.

Correction: when the child theme is active, the CSS for the entire site fails to load, not just for the navigation bar.

Just to clarify things here:

1) child theme style.css: I did call the parent theme ‘twentythirteen’ at Template: twentythirteen, and the import function with ‘@import url(“../wp-content/themes/twentythirteen”)’, and

2) functions. php: I did use an opening <?php and closing ?> tag to contain the modified scripts.

Jeremy, thank you for enlightening me on this. When I moved my test site from a local to production/test enviroment on the host server, JP connected to WP.com just fine. Thanks for the referral to the link above. I’ll check it out.

One additional step I took: deleted the Jetpack plugin, and installed a fresh copy of the JP plugin (v.2.5). Attempts to connect to the WP.com server failed, and the xml-rpc-32700 error code was returned.

@cais – MAMP’S default Apache port is set to 80, and the MySQL port is set to 8889. I just attempted to create an album on the backend of the hosted site. I deactivated all my plugins, then activated NGG (v.2.0.33), and experienced the same problem; albums fail to create, and won’t display when posted to a page. My web host is Go Daddy.

I recall reading older posts in the forum (>1 y.o., NGG v1.9.x) that a similar problem was occurring. Someone in the know said it had to a do with a JS script that wasn’t executing properly. Resolving a bug at that level is way beyond my paygrade! Let me know if you learn anything new.

At this point, the work around is to just configure a custom gallery that contains a select number of images. Creating an album of 2 or more galleries is a nice feature. I can live without it for now as long as I can work around it.

Moved post to NGG forum. Mark post resolved.

I solved my problem. Here are my lessons learned, for the benefit of others.

1) Make sure you have a complete, current copy of WP in your local root directory. This is easily downloaded from the WP.org website. My web host appeared to install WP differently in its domain directory in comparison to WPs’ file structure. That discrepancy between the hosted site’s WP files and the complete WP file structure made it impossible to cleanly load WP locally.

2) Sources differ on where to place the local installed files of the web site. I eventually went with the directions from MAMP and chose ‘/Applications/MAMP/htdocs.

3) Two plugins recommended by Mac MacDonald were invaluable in speeding up the local installation; BackUpWordPress (BUWP) and WP Migrate DB (WPMDB). The former zips up and downloads the WP files and MySQL db to your computer, and the latter creates a standalone MySQL db file to install through phpMyAdmin. I used BUWP to migrate the host files, and WPMDB to download a copy of the MySQL db. Incidentally, BUWP cut down on the time to copy and download the hosted files compared with FTP by about an hour.

4) With a fresh install of WP in the /htdocs directory, I overwrote the wp-content directory there with the files downloaded from the host site using the BUWP plugin.

5) Per egalo’s instructions, be sure to set up your local domain, and define your localhost (IP address 127.0.0.1) using Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) to whatever your local installation url you choose (e.g. change from host site url ‘mysite.com’ to local site url ‘mysitedev.com’).

6) Very important: After migrating your hosted site’s WP files and db, find and replace all references to your host sites’ url with your local sites’ url. See egalo’s ‘Fixing the WP URLs’ using phpMyAdmin for step-by-step instructions (link in step 5 above).

7) Use Interconnect/IT’s WordPress safe search and replace tool for correcting serialized data strings in your WP files. You download their software, unzip the file and place it in your WP root directory (in my case, ‘/htdocs’). To run the file, type in your browser address bar: localhost/searchreplacedb2.php (or whatever you renamed their file on your computer). Then follow the prompts. The find and replace function is fast (fractions of a second). As they say over and over, REMOVE and discard the find/replace file from your hard drive when done so no once can make mischief with it if your machine gets hacked.

8) MAMP was acting wonky on me. While MAMP’s documentation says in ‘Preferences/Start_Stop’ to define the start page url as ‘Applications/MAMP/htdocs’, I received an error message in my browser when I selected that definition. [Note: MAMP’s start page is not the same as the document root defined elsewhere in Preferences for the Apache server.] One user on the MAMP forum found that using ‘/phpMyAdmin’ as the start page url worked fine. It does. It will just bypass MAMPs landing page and take you directly to phpMyAdmin.

9) Entering in my browser: ‘localhost/wp-login.php’ took me to WP’s login page for the local WP install. Entering the username and PW from my hosted site generated a ‘404 Not Found’ page and a url in the browser address bar of ‘mylocalurl.com/mylocalurl.com/wp-admin/’. When I change the address bar url to: ‘mylocalurl.com/wp-admin’, my WP administrative dashboard popped up! Not sure why, but that’s where I wanted to go all along. Works for me.

Problem solved. World saved!

Maybe this link to pastebin will work better.

Found a post marked ‘resolved’ from 1 year ago re: installation of php code in a header.phpchild theme file to activate Meteor Slides. The plugin author recommended adding the following code just before the opening html tag for the navigation bar:

<?php if ( function_exists( 'meteor_slideshow' ) ) { meteor_slideshow(); } ?>

I tried this in the Twenty Plus Pro header.php child theme file (through the Theme editor) and received a syntax error.

Pastebin link to the file is here<script src=”https://pastebin.com/embed_js.php?i=NA50Mv6P”></script&gt;. Could someone tell me were the appropriate insertion point should be for the Meteor Slides php activation script?

Looking at Josh Leuze’s blog post on Creating Your Own Page Templates (posted 11/13/10) got me looking more closely at the source code on pages.php in the Twenty Twelve parent theme, and comparing the files in the Twenty Plus Pro child theme on my site.

In Josh’s example , he adds a comment and line of php code in his chlld theme filephp_home.php (usingTwenty Ten as the parent theme):

<?php // Loads the Meteor Slides plugin slideshow: https://www.jleuze.com/plugins/meteor-slides/

      if(function_exists('meteor_slideshow')) { meteor_slideshow(); } ?>

.

When I examine the Twenty Twelve parent theme Page Template file (page.php), I don’t see a php tag for meteor slides (naturally!). When I look at the Twenty Plus Pro child theme files from Zeaks.org, I don’t see any child theme files that address the parent page.php file.

Should I create a page.php file in my child theme in which to add the Meteor Slides plugin slideshow?

OK, the backup finally ran (40 minutes after the hour), and files were loaded into DB. I’m getting used to the quirks of this plugin.

Received the following message on the backup log: hr:min:sec Approximately unknown % complete.

How do I know if all my core and plugin files were backed up in that 120 second span?

Thank you Lee. I checked out S Stern’s site as you suggested, and found his solution interesting and useful. However, I decided to carry on with installing Zeaks code, and finally got it to install correctly. The solution: download his blank child theme, change the content, copy his code for the footer, functions, and style files exactly as posted on his site, then upload to my host.

Thank you MM! Your suggestion worked! I’m astounded that the solution was right under my nose the entire time and I couldn’t see it. Through cPanel X, I visited phpMyAdmin/mydatabase/wp_users and viewed the user_password entry after I changed the WP password at /mydomain.com/wp-login.php. The PW entry was a long string of letters, numbers and symbols. When you wrote “one-way hashed representation of the password”, I assume that the string of letters, numbers, etc. in the phpMyAdmin db table was intended to cover up the actual WP password to which I changed. Anyway, problem resolved. Thank you again.

Hi songdogtech,

You’re certainly onto something. Everything in the wp-config.php file looks OK. On closer inspection, I realized that the MySQL database user name listed in the config file was not fully registered with the MySQL database itself. Duh! [For those of you following this thread, I went to cPanel X/Databases/MySQL Databases/ and reviewed the list of current databases. The MySQL database in question was listed, a user was registered, but not assigned. I went down to ‘Add User to Database’ and added the db_user named in the wp-config file to the actual database.

When I go to my url: /mydomain.com/wp-login.php, I now see a WP login screen, not the ‘Error establishing a database connection’ message. That’s progress. Now I can’t login to my site’s administrative panel!

I went back to cPanel at my web host and went into phpMyAdmin at ‘yogaman_wp1 (name of my database)/wp_users, and edited the table to change the WP user name and PW. Reentered the new data on the wp-login page, and could not get in (the entry boxes shook). Changed wp_user & PW again at phpMyAdmin, and again, same result. Any suggestions?