We had about 15 happy campers at today’s meetup in North York.
The discussion was lively and we learned a lot about WordPress, the web, CSS plugins and much more.
Thank you all for coming and joining us at our monthly meetup. See you on May 20th, and don’t forget to post your “Let’s Fix Your Website” issues before next meetup.
Here is a short summary of the main items covered today:
Atila wanted to learn about in this meet-up:
1) In the theme that he uses, he can’t change the size of the logo and the color of the title. Are there any alternative ways to to it? We went over CSS and how most themes eventually require some CSS knowledge to make changes which are not readily configurable in the Customizer. Atila’s site is hosted on WordPress.com so the CSS editing instructions on the WordPress.com help is most applicable to him.
https://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-design-editing-css
We added a short CSS rule to increase the size of heading text on his website and saved the setting for the start of his CSS learning journey.
We also learned CSS by using the inspector tool in Google Chrome.
The other questions will be pushed to future meetups as they involve editing the theme which is not possible on WordPress.com. We talked about the flexibility one gets with a self-hosed WordPress.org website.
2) Is there a way for the posts to automatically move into the selected pages (besides gathering them in their selected categories)? – There is a good solution using shortcodes. And once your site is on wordpress.com you can utilize all their shortcodes they have to offer, see here.
The display-posts shortcode will give you lots of options in fine tuning the posts you would like to display on a page, rather than just displaying an archive or category page.
If your WordPress site is self hosted (wordpress.org) you can either install Jetpack which will add the options for all the WordPress.com shortcodes (among other features, which some say are too much and makes the plugin bloated…), or install a 3rd party plugin to achieve the same results. There are a ton of them. I can recommend on WP Show Posts.
3) Which other themes support displaying category pages on homepage?
4) For the theme “Traveler”, which additional plugins can I use for a better website performance and customization?
Victoria
I am struggling with the latest WordPress updates to version 5.0/ Two sites I have are:
http://torontodancefridays.com
Both are using the same theme (Bridge): https://themeforest.net/item/bridge-creative-multipurpose-wordpress-theme/7315054
I’m having difficulties with updates, especially with the WP Bakery plugin (it works somewhat- but I cannot get it configured correctly). I am also trying to move the hosting of http://torontodancefridays.com to another location – but have had to reconfigure the site in the new space, instead of a back-up and install (I don’t know how to do this!).
I’m hoping someone might be familiar with the theme, the WP Bakery page builder plugin and its issues, and the new WordPress set-up with Blocks, BeaverBuilder, etc. – I have found it confusing to keep up to date with these updates and not even sure where to start!
We installed the “classic editor” pluigin since Gutenberg did not show the option to edit with the Visual Composer (WP Bakery) page builder. The VC builder did not render the code and the post was full of shortcodes from Visual Composer. We suggested that Victoria get in touch with the theme author for support.
Nick Doughty
Nick wanted to know about plugins to optimize his website. The following were mentioned:
To embed videos in the site, Nick can upload them to YouTube or Vimeo and then use the standard embedding mechanism in the post or page editor.
Fernne
Hello, I’m at https://fernnekane.com. Need to add a thank you page coming out of the contact form. Would my Envato Themeforest theme have a template? They have a huge choice of variations for every type of page. Or would I find this page with the plugin for the contact form?
Since Fernne already had Contact Form plugin installed we looked at options to extend its functionality.
We suggested installing the CF7 redirection plugins which will allow the form to redirect the user to the thank you page: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpcf7-redirect/
After installing the plugin, we created a thank you page and then set up the CF7 redirection plugin to this page after submitting the form. After creating the page we can go back and design it to our liking.
We also talked about PHP versions on the hosting server. We should aim towards a minimum of PHP version 7 and up. Upgrading from version 5 is done either by the hosting company or through the hosting control panel. After upgrading we should check that our site is up and running. If any plugins which are not compatible with PHP7 they should be upgraded or turned off.