zimbo000

Thanks for taking another look.

Indeed the FlexSlider is now working as of this afternoon and I was going to update this thread soon.

There was no specific or standard theme CSS targeting either type of slider. However…

NivoSlider loads images via img elements within div tags and appropriate Nivo classes.

FlexSlider loads its images and nav controls within li elements. Via Dev Tools, I discovered that at some point in the distant past, and I know not when, that I had added a “margin-left: 2em” CSS declaration on the li element of one of the theme’s generic containers in my child theme CSS. When I disabled this, FlexSlider, which was within said container, displayed correctly. Because NivoSlider does not use li elements, it was unaffected.

I have removed the declaration from my child theme without apparent effect or impact, so I will remain in the dark as to what this CSS was supposed to do, and my notes in the file by the declaration were sufficiently vague to be of no help. ??

Thanks for your assistance in resolving this.

Steve – I have loaded that page with only the FlexSlider and it still displays incorrectly. To prove the point, I’ve removed the NivoSlider.

We have been creating NivoSliders on the site since 2014 and they worked then and still do today. The theme however was changed in 2018. We continued to use NivoSliders under the new theme without any problems or any differences when creating.

You state that I “had custom CSS targeting NivoSlider”. You previously suggested that there was “specific CSS that applies only to Nivo slideshows.” But you’ve provided no evidence to support that and when you wrote the latter, the issue we were discussing was to do with “Disable Legacy Libraries” , not NivoSlider.

It’s not logical that the theme developer would insert CSS to interfere specifically with MetaSlider. And anyway, NivoSliders work correctly, always have, and we’ve created many more since the last discussion.

This support question is not about NivoSlider, it is that FlexSlider is not displaying properly, and I’d like to get it working.

Steve, I was only trying to provide information that might help you identify why the two slideshows created as Flex sliders under 3.92 were not displaying properly.

As per my last post, I did not change anything with regard to the plugin, I merely updated from 3.91 to 3.92, but could no longer create Nivo shows and could not find anything in the Flex settings to fix the display problems.

There were no browser console errors and on the test site I deactivated all plugins except MetaSlider but still could turn off Disable Legacy.

However after a bit of digging around in the plugin code I found the cause and Disable Legacy is now off and I can create Nivo sliders again. I have changed both the Flex sliders to Nivo and both are now displaying properly.

@stevejburge

I think we need to step back here for a moment and review what the problems are.

Let us forget about the preview images and loading time issues for one moment (although both are clearly problems) and just focus on the slideshows themselves.

V3.91 of the plugin worked fine without any problems.

The last slideshow created on 3.91 (which was updated to that version on 17th September) is the one in this post: https://www.henleyherald.com/2024/10/15/hawks-women-run-rampant-over-beckenham/

This is a Nivo slideshow and works fine, as do all the 2000+ ‘shows we’ve created since 2014.

The plugin was updated on 17th October to V3.92.

It is important to stress that I made no changes to the plugin settings after the update. If the update made changes, I was unaware of that. We just went to create a new slideshow a few days later as we have done for years.

The first ‘show created after the 3.92 update on 22nd October is in this post: https://www.henleyherald.com/2024/10/22/titchener-makes-the-difference-as-hawks-overcome-oaks-in-close-contest/

This is a Flex slideshow. As you can see by looking at the ‘show, its formatting is messed up.

The next ‘show created on 23rd October is in this post: https://www.henleyherald.com/2024/10/23/rain-doesnt-dampen-spirits-at-41st-henley-half-marathon/

Again it is a Flex slideshow and also messed up. You will note there are two shows in the post (to illustrate a problem). The bottom one is the original ‘show created using 3.92. I then rolled back the plugin to 3.91 using WP Rollback. Because that ‘show was not right, a new slideshow was created from scratch using 3.91. This is what is currently showing as the top ‘show in the post – yet it is displaying exactly the same as the 3.92 version.

Whatever changes were made from 3.91 to 3.92 has resulted in new slideshows being forced as Flex ‘shows and the Disable Legacy Libraries setting does not work.

I would also hazard a guess that changes were made to some of the default settings when creating a new show and the database tables because the half-marathon ‘show added under the rolled-back 3.91 has the same formatting problems as the 3.92 ‘show.

I hope this is useful to clarify this particular problem and that it will allow you to issue an urgent fix. Thank you.

@htmgarcia – see my comment above: “The Disable Legacy Libraries in Settings is broken and cannot be turned off.”

Updating to 3.92 has changed something in either the settings or database that I appear not be able to change back, despite a rollback to 3.91.

The ‘german tourist’ slideshow was created 11th October and is a Nivo show created under 3.91 (I updated the plugin on 17th October). The half-marathon one created a few days ago under 3.92 is a Flex show and if you take a look at it, the formatting is completely out of whack.

I see two options: you say Nivo is still available but I can find nowhere in the plugin to re-enable it, or to get back the options we used to use for shows. How can I create a new Nivo show today?

Or we switch to Flex moving forward but what I can’t work out is why the two shows created under 3.92 are so messed up in their formatting. We’ve simply created two new shows using the options now on the right side of Add New. Why are they displaying like that? How do I fix them?

I have to be honest and say that I find the preview images on slideshows pages changing all time extremely annoying – and this doesn’t account for the fact that it doesn’t work properly.

Please can you add an option in Settings to allow this to be switched off?

I have rolled back to 3.91 and we created a new slideshow for this post (https://www.henleyherald.com/2024/10/23/rain-doesnt-dampen-spirits-at-41st-henley-half-marathon/) but if you look at the story you can see the slideshow is still broken.

I have determined that this slider has a class of metaslider-flex whereas all our sliders used to be Nivo. The slider here https://www.henleyherald.com/2024/10/11/german-visitors-from-twin-town-leichlingen-enjoy-midsomer-murders-tour/ has a class of metaslider-nivo.

The Disable Legacy Libraries in Settings is broken and cannot be turned off. How do I enable Nivo again?

The number of options when creating a new slideshow has been drastically reduced. Why? Image Crop is Smart Crop by default which appears to be creating some problems.

Why are all these changes being made without any notice to users? Please advise how to get the half-marathon slideshow working in the same way that we created the ‘german visitors’ show.

The second slideshow not displaying any images in preview (Imgur link) is the one in this story: https://www.henleyherald.com/2019/12/12/children-get-to-meet-santa-at-badgemore-school-xmas-fair/, but the other issue is none of the preview images display in full, they are all cut-off.

If you click on the URLs in my first post above you will see the problems with the slideshows created on 3.92.0 – the rugby and half-marathon stories.

It’s quicker but still taking 12 seconds each to carry out any action, e.g. access MetaSlider, edit, change slideshows page. Other actions on the site take a second or less, e.g. access Yoast.

It has not solved the slideshows ordering problem. The first slider on the ‘shows first page is dated 11th December 2019. The first slider created was 23rd June 2014 – this is now on page 91 out of 245. The last slider on page 245 is the ‘show created just before the 11/12/19 one on page 1.

Same issue with the thumbnails still not showing as per my last post – https://imgur.com/RNtbTxp

And the two sliders created using 3.92.0 are still messed up.

This is a live news website and I’ll need to rollback so that the editor can update the site and fix the two broken sliders.

Just the 2442 sliders on the live site… ??

However, I installed 3.92.0 on the test site, which only has 52 sliders. On there, there is not the loading time problem but the thumbnail images of existing sliders are still cycling around showing the individual images in each slider but the complete image is never shown, there’s always a bit missing from the bottom: https://imgur.com/o1gyqgh

I don’t recall these images cycling around before, is this a new function? And if it is, why is the whole image not being shown? If it’s a bug, does 3.92.1 fix it?

The problem has not re-occurred since, I deactivated the plugin then reactivated. I did not re-install as I haven’t got the time to go through setting everything up again. If it happens again, I’ll post again.

Why? What a stupid change. Extremely unhelpful. And NOT listed in the Changelog either.

Please change it back. And the Transition setting.

Auto play is off always for any new slideshow.

I beg to disagree. I’ve been using MetaSlider for nearly 8 years now and I’ve never had to alter the Auto Play setting in all that time. It has always been On when creating a new slider because that’s the only setting we use, obviously being picked up from the last slide show we created. But over the past week or so, every new slider has had Auto Play set to Off.

Ditto Transition: never had to change it in years, it was always Fade on every new slider because that’s all we’ve ever used. Now it’s always Random on a new slider.

Please review this again.

Thanks, but I cannot see a black widget on the home page?

However I logged in to the account and selected Reports where there was a message to the effect that tracking was currently disabled because no-one had logged in for 60 days (I did tell the client he had to do this and he supposedly set a calendar reminder, plus he will have received your reminder email, but to no avail…), so I clicked the link to re-enable it. Hopefully the stats will start to appear again now.

That solved it, thanks. But I’m curious as to why this has happened now – the site has been running for years and WP-Optimize used for page caching for most of those yet this problem has never occurred before.

Any ideas why now?