WordPress

There are 26 posts filed in WordPress (this is page 2 of 3).

Trying to get my WordPress site back

Earlier this week, I wanted to start posting again on my website, AndySylvester.com. When I went to log in, all I saw was a white screen. After some searching, I found that this was a thing for WordPress sites (“white screen of death”). Ugh – just what I needed! I found a few articles (https://themeisle.com/blog/cant-access-wp-admin/, https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/fix-wordpress-white-screen-of-death, https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/fix-locked-out-of-wordpress-admin-issue)

and did the following steps:

• Added a line in wp-config.php to increase memory to 64 MB
• Checked my WordPress core files (they were up to date)
• Renamed my plugin and themes directories
• Added a DEBUG MODE statement to wp-config.php

At this point, I was able to see some error messages:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-config.php:1) in /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-login.php on line 462

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-config.php:1) in /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-login.php on line 478

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-config.php:1) in /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6828

However, I still could not log in. I spent some time with Bluehost tech support (both chat and phone support), but did not get much help there. As part of their troubleshooting, I turned SSL support on and off (that had a side effect, will discuss later in this post).

Per this post, I removed the closing PHP tag in wp-config.php.

Per this Stack Exchange post (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42832860/wordpress-utf-8-without-bom), I resaved wp-config.php and wp-login.php to force UTF-8 encoding without BOM. At that point, the error messages were removed, and the login fields remained, but now I was getting messages related to cookies, and saw some redirection in the URL field in the browser. Read through these articles (https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/215032/cookie-domain-setting-confusion, https://wp-staging.com/how-to-fix-the-error-cookies-are-blocked-or-not-supported-by-your-browser/).

I tried to get Bluehost to turn off SSL for my site (although I already de-selected that). They said they turned it off, but subdomains on andysylvester.com still showed up as secure sites, which messed up some of the display (had links to http which were interpreted as “unsecure” – arrrgh!).

I decided to change the URL of my site in the MySQL database from http://andysylvester.com to https://andysylvester.com.

Also, per this post (https://themeisle.com/blog/add-wordpress-https/) , I added the following line to wp-config.php:

define(‘FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true);

After I did this, I was FINALLY able to log into my site – whew!

I do not know how this whole thing started, but I am glad to get back to posting!

Choosing a mailing list tool for WordPress besides MailChimp

I started a news site for covering the protests in Portland (https://portlandprotestnews.com/), and I wanted to offer a way for people to subscribe to an email newsletter containing the daily posts. My first thought was to set up a MailChimp newsletter, since I already had one set up for another site (https://OrgModeForBeginners.com). However, I quickly realized the first limitation of a free account on MailChimp – only one mailing list allowed – darn! I was not interested in starting to pay $10/month to MailChimp, and it would only bump up to 3 mailing lists. So, I started looking for other free alternatives.

My first step was to find another service like MailChimp. After a little searching, I decided to try out Sendinblue (https://www.sendinblue.com/). However, the email it sent out was not impressive (I selected a RSS publish, and it did not show any links except to the main posts), and the subscription form had some problems in sizing, so I resumed my search.

My next experiment was to look at the mailing list feature provided by my web hosting service (based on GNU Mailman (https://list.org/)). I spent about 4 hours over 2 days poring through setup instructions and managed to get a mailing list set up that seemed to work the way I wanted. I then needed to create a signup form, and tried using WPForms (https://wpforms.com/), which was available as a free plugin within my WordPress install. I got a form set up, but then had problems getting the form to send an email to the email address for the mailing list to add a new subscriber. At that point, I decided to try another tack – looking for a WordPress plugin that could handle everything.

The first plugin I tried was WP-Subscribe (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-subscribe/), but it only worked with MailChimp, Aweber, and Feedburner (could not use any other email delivery provider, I was thinking I could reuse the Mailman list I set up, but no go). The grand prize winner was The Newsletter Plugin (https://www.thenewsletterplugin.com/), which had a free version that supported signing up subscribers, creating a newsletter, and sending it out to the list. After about an hour of testing, I sent out my first newsletter, and it looked good! I ended up deciding to copy the text from the daily weblog post to the HTML email newsletter form, and adding custom embed code for Twitter posts.

Overall, I learned a lot about setting up mailing lists and figuring out what I wanted from a mailing list tool. My top features were price and ease of use. If I could have created another MailChimp list, I would have done it in a second (since I had an account). Since I did not want to spend anything just yet on a new mailing list provider, ease of use was the next criteria. It was a shame that it took the better part of two days to weed through the contenders, but I think I found a solution that will at least get me started.

We’ll show you how you can publish interactive, openly licensed webbooks and quickly produce export formats for offline access (EPUB, PDF, MOBI, etc) using Pressbooks, an open source book publishing platform built on top of WordPress multisite.

 

Testing upgrade to WordPress 5.3.2

I was trying to use some IndieWeb plugins (Post Kinds in particular), but had not updated my site in a while (I think I was at 4.7.13). I took a look at Chris Aldrich’s site and saw that he was using WP version 5.3.2, so I decided to make the jump. Overall, the upgrade went smoothly. I downloaded the Classic Editor plugin so that the Post Kinds plugin would work. I was also prompted to update all of my existing IndieWeb plugins. After all of that, I still had some problems with the Post Kinds plugin for the Read post kind (I was not seeing the Post Properties window within the Admin interface. I started to write a Github issue, but then went back to a Chris Aldrich post on the Post Kinds plugin, and saw that I wrote a comment on that post about this problem. Chris replied with a suggestion to  click on the Screen Options tab in the top right hand corner of the admin UI and then check the Response Properties box. That worked!

So far, so good….

Editing Issue in WordPress – Right to Left Text Display

A few weeks ago, I was editing a post in the WordPress Classic Editor (WordPress v4.7.1). After about 2 paragraphs, I accidentally touched the trackpad on my laptop, or did something with the mouse, and then noticed that the editor was behaving strangely. As I was typing, the new text was appearing in a right-to-left direction instead of left-to-right direction.

My first response was to check the INS/DEL keyboard keys, but that did not correct the problem. I then copied the text into a new post, but the problem remained. I then switched from Visual mode to Text mode in the WordPress post editor, and saw some extra elements in the paragraph tag (like the ones in this W3Schools page). When I deleted all the extra text in the paragraph tag, the editor started working as expected again.

Has this ever happened to any other WordPress user? I would like to know….

 

I liked this perspective on the Gutenberg editor. My site is still on WordPress 4.7.2, so I have not made the jump yet.