Our sincere apologies for not having a recap from the October 2019 “Let’s Fix Your WordPress Site” meetup. I was out of town for that meetup, but our gracious host Dan Stramer took over and handled the event with care. This month we had 21 people show up, and that was a packed full house for Lokaal. Instead of the usual 2 pizzas, we ended up getting 3 pizzas to make sure everyone was well fed, caffeinated and had something to drink at the end of the event. Thanks to Weglot.com for continuing to sponsor our food at the event.
Robin Macrae recording over 90 minutes of our meetup and you can listen in below.
Sponsorship
Weglot automatically translates your website content in the cloud, and features an easy workflow to manage all translations in over 100+ languages. Check out the sidebar widget on this website to switch languages on-the-fly for all WordPress content, forms, buttons and user interface items.
Weglot has announced a BLACK FRIDAY SALE!!! Use code WG2019BF30 for 30% off any paid plan FOREVER! The code is valid from Nov 22 2019 to Dec 3 2019.
Genkui Liu asked about a formatting issue on his blog. The logo in the header was obscuring the posts due to an issue with the theme. Dan Stramer put together some CSS in the meetup notes ahead of the meeting which was really nice! It saved us a lot of time to debug the CSS, but we went ahead and went through the Dev Tools and understanding what CSS was for everyone there. Suffice it to say about a third of the people in attendance knew how important and powerful CSS was. By adding a short snippet of code to the theme’s Additional CSS options we were able to ensure the logo in the header did not obscure the blog posts and didn’t affect the home page either:
.blog article:first-child {
margin-top: 150px;
}
Issue Solved!
Aya asked about affiliate marketing directly after the meetup. We discussed the various types of affiliate marketing. Alex encouraged her to learn about Affiliate Marketing for free on Lynda.com. Did you know you can get free access with a library card in Toronto and Vaughan? Here’s an introduction to affiliate marketing class. But in general Alex’s opinion is that building high quality, targeted content using keywords that people are searching for is a better investment than affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing works great particularly for physical products that are not very expensive but in high demand. Sometimes there are some “fishy” affiliate programs that just create poor back-links that you really don’t want pointing to your site.
Advice Provided!
G asked about a language switcher issue for her site HelloSaturday.ca. She used some custom CSS to provide a flag but it was not working for another language. She was using the Polylang plugin that already has support for a language switcher but for some reason this was not working in her theme. Alex introduced a menu with the Polylang switcher and placed it into the location in the menu but that broke the site and created a chain icon. Fortuantely Q was able to help G on a separate break out during our food break and all was well again. Sorry about the break rather than the fix! Alex encouraged G to try Weglot, our food/drink sponsor, as well to see if there’s a better multilanguage solution for your site that is not as finicky.
Site Broken and then Fixed by an Attendee!
Ambrese wanted some help on editing content and modifying her site’s menu. We went through a session to ensure the Gutenberg block editor was active on her site. That proved to be a bit more challenging than suspected because the option in Settings > Writing had classic editor turned off for new posts and pages. And yet Gutenberg was not being invoked. Alex disabled the Classic Editor plugin and still the classic editor was being loaded!?
Then we noticed that a message from the SiteOrigin page builder stated that the classic editor was being invoked in the settings for SiteOrigin. The page builder was forcing the classic editor be loaded even though the standard settings had it turned off! We proceeded to find a setting in the SiteOrigin page builder general settings to ensure the block editor was active. It was a classic usability nightmare with page builders using lots of effort and sneaky settings to make sure users were not aware that the block editor was present. Surely SiteOrigin wants their own page builder used. This was reported as a bug 5+ months ago! Very uncool SiteOrigin! Ambrese had the Twenty Twenty theme installed and it appeared to be quite usable with a new menu system that was tabbable and easily accessed with the keyboard.
Issue Solved and Training Provided!
The next Let’s Fix Your WordPress Site meetup is on Dec 18 at 6:30 at Lokaal once again. It’s our last one for the year so bring your holiday cheer! Feel free to wear an ugly sweater, tie or hat.