On many Home-Start sites, and some of the regional charity websites I have included one or more password based pages. You can add these yourself, it is controlled in the editing view of the page or post on the right handside where it refers to Visibility. You have the following available:
Public
Public (and stick to the front page)
Password Protected
Private
Items are normally set up as Public. If you use Public and stick to the front page, check what it does first. It may not work as you expect it to work because it relates to the template.
Password protected pages in Divi
There is an annoying problem with password protected pages in Divi, if you try to enter one the first time you will see small writing on the left and a button on the right. On a wide screen these look totally disconnected, and not obvious. If you have a non Divi based website, you are unaffected.
I have been using the new editor in WordPress on my website. It is a bit of a learning journey, but I am getting the hang of it. Like most things it needs a little effort on the part of the editor to learn how to use it.
However, I do this every day and you do not. My guidance for now, is stick with the standard editor that is currently in WordPress and leave it a few months before considering upgrading your installation. I am concerned for those of you that dip into your websites once a month or less, the learning curve is going to be too steep, and as a result websites might no longer be updated which would be a disaster.
Latest news on this: 1/10/18 Moove Agency have reported a new update to this plugin as of 8am this morning. So this problem may resolve itself without any intervention.
I have added a GDPR cookie plugin to some sites which provides a warning message at the bottom of the website. This has worked fine for five months up until a couple of days ago when the plugin author introduced a bug which affects how it is presented.
It is not a critical bug, it affects presentation more than anything else, but is annoying.
If the bottom of your website has a large white area and the text left justified on your screen tightly in the bottom left corner, then you are affected.
If your site looks like this or you can see a cog in the bottom corner of your screen then you are unaffected. The cookie warning usually looks like this for first time visitors.
This is only of interest to Divi template based websites. If you use this facility in your template and it is not Divi based, take care to check what it does before you accept using it. Different templates work in different ways.
Many of the latest Divi based designs I have been building for both Home-Starts and other groups have at least one news page, often more than one. For example a summary on the home page of the latest six news items is useful, and a fully featured news page as well for everything.
Filtering News
You can do this on other sites, but within the Divi environment it is very easy to use: you can have a fundraising page, and at the bottom of the page have a Fundraising blog. This is an automatic feature where any new posts which you categorise as Fundraising will appear there. They will also change over time as you add more content.
Sometimes you can see a small symbol where an image should be located, why is it broken, what does it mean, and how can I fix it?
Missing image symbol is at the bottom of this screen shot
What this symbol means is that there was an image referenced here and it is now no longer available. It displays this small icon to indicate it is missing.
Around April/ May 2018 Facebook made changes to the way data could be streamed based on content on Facebook Group pages. This stopped most Facebook feeds on websites where I used the plugin Facebook Feed by WebDorado.
Apparently it is possible to get the feed working but there are some things that an admin will need to do to get it to work. That is a “Facebook Account Admin”.
WebDorado have released a tutorial on it. If you can set it up, you should be able to get your facebook feeds working again on your website. I have not done this yet by the way, just letting you know. They appear to have updated their plugin with a link to the guidance.
I cannot really help you here, you need to work with whomever is responsible for the Facebook page for your organisation as they will have the authority to access the system. If you manage to get the information required, let me know and I will help you to get it working again.
Personally I use Chrome for most of the work I do from a computer. I may use MS Edge (rarely) or Firefox to test outside of the Google Chrome environment. While doing some of that testing I was surprised to see that it can be difficult to enter some information to get past this Google Recaptcha 2 screen below.
In June of this year Google changed the map service (and many other services as well) which we use on our websites. For most of you it does not make too much difference, in some cases however you may see grey screens where a map should be present, or comments over a map. If you see this let me know please.
It depends on whether the plugins in use on your site are using a Google API (Application Programming Interface), these now require keys to be generated. That is not such a problem, but now you cannot create them without the key being assigned to an account with a credit or debit card assigned to it.
The following is from a Google Developers website, note the text in the orange section below:
The mapping information used to be free and very useful. It is still free provided the number of calls (aka visitors) to the map does not exceed a credit limit which is being provided by Google. I am understandably not happy about having my credit card associated with your site in this way because I have no control over it. At the moment each call to create a map is 0.7cents (USD) which equates currently to 28,000 views per month.
It looks as though Google is offering a £100 credit, or $200 depending on where you look on the API type on each account. I need to figure out how to manage that so that the number of calls never exceeds £100 in any billing period otherwise I start to get charged.
I guess Google have placed a lot of time and money in the development of the APIs and now they have us all hooked they are choosing to monetise them, which is not so surprising.
In some cases I have embedded maps into your websites, and in others they are generated through plugins such as Modern Tribe Calendar. Check them and if there is a problem let me know.
There is a risk that the credit being offered by Google is just a transition to full billing in the future. Time will tell.
Right now, I am looking at this problem in detail on new developments. So more to follow later when I have figured it out.
I frequently find that people have uploaded images from their phones and cameras directly into the image library and then added them to a page. What they have forgotten to do is optimise the image for the browser screen.
If I look at my camera, it takes image which are 5700px wide x 3800 px high and 10MB in size.
My monitor screen is a little higher definition than HD, so these images are too large for my browser, and if viewed on a phone which may be 700 pixels wide or less they are huge by comparison.
For most users these days, they view websites on mobile devices and may not be doing this over WiFi, so if they are downloading your web page from a 4G or 3G network, it is costing them money.
As a general guide your images need to be no bigger than 150kB in memory size, and no larger than the largest screen you are likely to come across. Today that is around 1200px for the web content space for most sites. Many of the sites I have built, the content area is no wider than 1080px. Continue reading Managing Images in WordPress
I continue to be impressed by the Elegant Themes Divi template which has made many sites that use it a lot more interesting to use, and they all look very professional. Many commercial web development agencies are now basing sites on Divi, I am seeing it all of the time.
