Aug 2024
Google calendar link
The add to google calendar button at the bottom of the events page no longer displayed correctly due to a broken URL. I updated the Single Events Page Format to use a #_EVENTADDTOCALENDAR widget instead to avoid the problem as suggested here (Suzanne).
April 2024
WP Mail SMTP
When new users are added or people forget their passwords, WP is supposed to send the password or a link for changing the password. But this hasn’t worked for years. This is what you have to do. Briefly I installed a new plugin WP Mail SMTP and put in the settings (the emails will be sent from admin@camdencyclists.org.uk which has a mailbox as well as a forwarder; I had to reset the password so that I could supply it in the settings. Then try ‘test’ under WP Maill SMTP/Tools.
Home Page
New post on how the Home page is laid out by widgets. See here.
Display of posts by category on the Home Page
The posts are displayed by category on the Home page in the first two columns of the black band at the bottom. This is done by the WP Categories widget which is provided by a Plugin WP Categories. It doesn’t allow hierarchy to be shown whereas the Categories widget provided in WordPress does but the latter displays all of the categories. I (JD) decided to alter the hierarchy for minutes so that the two sorts of minutes (monthly meeting and quarterly meeting) no longer have a parent.
Feb 2024
To be able to control the number of posts (news, events, NLs) separately on mobiles and on desktop computers add another
(Genesis Featured Posts widget – news) to the EZ Home Sidebar so that one is for desktop and the other for mobiles
and set mobiles to 3 events, 1 NL and 2 new
Jan 2024
Installed Jetpack Search. See this page to exclude a category – code used in a CodeSnippet (a plugin).
New versions of Genesis and Dynamic-gen. Problem with the functions file again. See March 2023.
Used a “code snippet” with he two extra functions and left the simple functions file in place. So with luck next time we update dynamic-gen, nothing will need to be done.
Widget contents
Code for cycle counts in uploads/widgetNew2 copy.html – EZ Feature top 1
October 2023
Home page: third column to have Newsletters (with featured images) instead of News From Elsewhere (category other news).
- Altered postie settings to make default category ‘newsletters’. Note that featured images can be sent as an attachment (only attachment) with the postie email.
- Edited widget EZ Home Sidebar to list the ‘newsletters’ (Genesis Featured Posts widget).
- Note See Postie usage to find out how to send a category so that ‘Other News’ will still be able to be posted.
Home page on mobiles: reorder to Events, Newsletters, News
- Widget EZ Home Top 1 – put on ‘Widget Display Control’ and set ‘show on Front Page’ and ‘Hide on Mobile’
- Widget EZ Home Sidebar – add a second Genesis Featured Posts widget to list ‘News’ with the same settings as in EZ Home Top 1 and put on ‘Widget Display Control ‘and set ‘show on Front Page’ and ‘Hide on Desktop’
Maintenence:
Updated all the plug-ins that needed it. REconnected JetPack so that stats are shown on the dashboard.
New version of dynamic-gen and disappearance of the search box from menu bar. Fixed as described in July. Also put the functions file online for others – in uploads/functions for dynamic gen
The blocks editor says: “The editor has encountered an unexpected error=xxx is not a function. But after wasting a lot of time and then clearing the browser cache all was well.
July 2023
The child theme Dynamic Gen had a new version – which Jean updated. The search box vanished but was reinstated as in March. Using the copy in my files which has the uncommenting required.
March 2023
Noticed that the search box had reverted to the situation noted in June 2021. That is:
Genesis 3.0 stopped providing nav bar extras around the time we lost the search box. See explanations here. That link provides PHP to add to functions in the child theme dynamic-gen. This has been added again and the search addition uncommented. Also put a copy of the file on my disc ccc/web site/dymanic-gen functions
February 2023
Consulted advice from IONOS after
Tried to update PHP to 8.1 and 8.0 error message
Constant DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT already defined in /homepages/17/d545958080/htdocs/clickandbuilds/CamdenCyclists/wp-config.php on line 87
It actually added define( ‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true ); on the third line
Delete this. and it generates a critical error after the above is deleted.
They increased memory limit on database (and commented out last line of wp-congfig.php)
FIXED
There is also a 403 error due to dynamic trying to access some old images we don’t use (put on developer tools console to see details)
Have updated all plugins and taken away all unused themes and updated Dynamic Gen (the child theme of Genesis).
NOTE: backups performed daily by UpDraftPlus (a plugin which can be used to restore a previous version or if website totally broken, restore from an empty wordpress.
The actual backups are on Amazon S3 (see Sept 2020)
October 2021
Installed the new LCC logos.
LCC provided EPS and we used the vertical red one after converting it to SVG at https://cloudconvert.com/eps-to-svg
This SVG was read into Intaglio and used to produce
– a red logo over a white square size 512 and png used for favicon
– The main site logo is put as SVG into the text widget “Header right”. A red logo over a white square didn’t look good. So we used a red logo over a white square with another white square on its right saved as SVG and then converted to an SVG size 100 x 200 at https://www.iloveimg.com Note: the logo looks low relative to the header on the left (but the old one was also low). Could fix this some time.
– a white logo over red square with CAMDEN for Twitter
August 2021
Widened the whole site by 120 px:
in Dashboard>Dynamik>Design, Widths tab, add 120 px to all the layouts (distributed evenly in the multi-column layouts). Also in the Wrap tab, change Inner left/right padding from 20px to 5 px.
This shows the old Widths settings:
June 2021
In November 2019 the search box disappeared from the main navigation bar, appearing only when the window was narrowed. We used various fixes such as putting another search box in the right-hand column.
First checked the role of search-3 (in widget Header Right). See the custom css under Dynamic. It has display: none but appears above the Nav Bar when the window is narrowed. If changed to display:online the menu appears below the logo.
Decided to investigate properly and saw from Wayback machine that there was code for a search box in the menu. So then investigated and found that Genesis 3.0 stopped providing nav bar extras around the time we lost the search box. See explanations here. That link provides PHP to add to functions in the child theme dynamic-gen. This has been added and the search addition uncommented.
Plugin for Flickr embed stopped working – date not recorded.
Need to get the links manually.
This Plugin no longer works. But when using the Blocks editor Flickr images can be used. Choose ‘Image’ and then insert from URL. (In Flickr choose ‘View all sizes; then select a size and right click to get URL).
2nd April 2021
LCC announces a new website which turns out to omit a lot of content from the previous website. Spent some time searching for broken links and found about 20 which have all been disconnected.
Used https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/ and found the LCC button on Home page needed fixing
Updated plugins. Conditional widgets (3) and Postie (1.9.55). Updated WP from 5.6.2 to 5.7. Updated users to reflect current roles. Note that former users are retained in the list so that their posts can continue to be attributed to them.
2020
17th June. News from Elsewhere to use Postie Plugin.
When Steven started to post News from Elsewhere, David Hastings used the JetPack plugin to set up ‘Post by email’. But by that method posting by email won’t work with the security in place. See:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Post_to_your_blog_using_email
I installed another Plugin mentioned on the above page – ‘Postie’. It works by polling emails from an email address set up to receive the posts.
It is configured
- to accept posts from users with author and editor access to WordPress via the email address they registered with.
- and to post to a particular category (i.e. OtherNews).
The sender has to put an excerpt in brackets e.g.
:excerptstart Euston Road, where's the cycle track? Pic credit: Michiel Joseph. The pace of progress on TfL and the Mayor’s Streetspace plans is currently too slow. The plan itself is vital, and the progress thus far is valued. But we’re not moving fast enough. :excerptend
The rest of the post follows. It should not include any definition of a category. Plugin updated 25 Oct 2021
NOTE: Oct 21 someone attempted to send from noreply@ionos.com and I received a warning email (from Postie) that the message had been put in the Spam mailbox marked as at the postie email address. Same again July 2022 but no action taken.
See Postie usage to find out how to send a category.
17th June. HTTPS enabled
Our website can now be addressed as:
https://camdencyclists.org.uk/
which means the server is now using our security certificate to validate the site’s identity.
At first Chrome said ‘Not Secure’ because we had lots of internal links to images etc that may not be protected. But this was fixed by the end of July .
Upgraded WordPress to 5.3.2
George fixed settings in Events Manager – OpenStreetMaps
July 10th on…Checking and fixing internal links
Used WPLink Status to generate scans. (internal links only)
Errors from News From Elsewhere due mainly to links such as /author in the source becoming our links plus a few images that we should not have captured.
Our own links that had been http and are translated by the code in .htaccess. Have fixed those.
SEPT 2020
Back Ups – Sept 2020
Daily UpdraftPlus WordPress emailed to Jean since 30th July. UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore is a Plugin
Checked on 25 Sept and see currently going to David’s Drop Box. 300 Mb?
Amazon S3 Standard $.024 per Gig per month immediate frequent access. We do 1 Gig a day and keep for 30 days. Total 30 Gig. Cost approx £1 per month.
29 Sept 2020: Changed to Amazon S3 – George’s account and Jean’s secret key and access key. S3 Location: s3://camdencyclists1 (it is possible to get new key pairs for this account and s3 bucket).
12 Oct: (after 14 days of backups): email from AWS:
Your AWS account 414149896309 has exceeded 85% of the usage limit for one or more AWS Free Tier-eligible services for the month of October.
AWS Free Tier Usage as of 10/12/2020 AWS Free Tier Usage Limit
1812.0 Requests 2,000 Put, Copy, Post or List Requests of Amazon S3
Widget and plugins checked Sept 26th
Put ‘articles and letters in press’ in Footer 2.
Problem – could not open widgets on dashboard
ADVANCED CATEGORY WIDGET incompatible with WP 5.5. DELETED
https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/advanced-categories-widget/
Now using WP Category Widget which doesn’t allow nesting of categories (in bottom footer) but we think that looks better..
Google Analyticator sent error email (hid the Widget editor) when we disabled it the widget settings reappeared. Now de-activated.
Other smaller issues
- Foobox crashed but all is well now. It provides a lightbox and image sequences.
- Flickr embed inserts http instead of https causing insecure posts
Summer 2018.
# Next two rules added by JD to make all accesses use secure HTTP
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
This then stopped Steven from being able to post his ‘News from Elsewhere’. So I temporarily put the .htaccess file back to its original state. We stayed like that for two years…
