Hi,

When you switch to a child theme you need to export your Customizer settings because of how WordPress works. More is explained here: https://wpexplorer-themes.com/total/docs/child-theme/

But if you prefer not to use a child theme you can try a snippet plugin like this – https://wordpress.org/plugins/code-snippets/

The snippet I linked to you before should be working correctly, but one thing to mention about with the custom excerpt module, there some extra checks to prevent large excerpts (since the overlay area is generally a bit small). You can see from the highlighted code here: https://cl.ly/e2b42d

To get around this you will want to make sure the excerpt length value in the portfolio grid is set to -1 like such: https://cl.ly/0e6760

I forgot to mention if you do set your excerpt to -1 then you don’t need to add any snippets to tweak the excerpts, you can then use the “Excerpt” field when editing a post to enter your custom excerpt which will display here.

Make sense?

- AJ

Hey AJ,

now I exported and imported all settings and everything works fine with the child theme. But the html formatting still doesn’t work. I integrated the Custom Excerpt Output Snippet in functions.php and added a text with html in excerpts field of my portfolio item. The overlay on my portfolio grid does only show plain text… What can we do?

Thanks in advance Daniel

Hi Daniel,

Sorry I briefly mentioned this in my last comment but I don’t think it was clear enough. So if you updated your site to the latest version of the theme (4.9+) you don’t need the first snippet I recommended.

All you need to do is add this code to your child theme instead:

add_filter( 'wpex_title_excerpt_hover_overlay_trim_custom_excerpts', '__return_false' );

So that your custom excerpt returns in full and with HTML formatting for the overlay.

- AJ

Just let me know if you need me to clear things up again. I can make a little video or documentation page perhaps explaining better.

It’s fine, actually I saw one of your blog posts about it which helped. FYI – this site is showing a security error: https://www.wpexplorer.com/resize-wordpress-images-on-the-fly-with-aqua-resizer/

Oh cool.

Yes, we had some issues with our certificate, it should be all fixed now though. If you do see issues though please let me know. Thanks!

- AJ

Hi AJ,

Seems like this is only a problem when I set the submit page to be a child page of the main reviews page. If I set submit as no parent, any URL including ‘send-review’ works fine.

Resaving permalinks didn’t make any difference.

I really just wanted to avoid the use of the word ‘submit’.

No big deal that I can’t set it as a child page though.

Thanks for your help, Paul.

Hi Paul,

What’s the slug of the main reviews page? And also have you enabled auto archive for the testimonials post type under the “Post Type Editor” panel?

I would like to test locally and see if I can figure out what’s going on and if it’s a valid issue or not. If not, maybe I could submit a fix to WordPress core.

- AJ

Hi AJ,

Main reviews page slug is ‘reviews’, the page I have the submission form on is ‘send-review’. Auto archive is disabled.

Thanks.

Hi,

I think you were also asking via WordPress.org – https://wordpress.org/support/topic/theme-settings-section-not-showing/

If so, when I visit your profile I found this website – http://n4-cambiaste.node7.auctionmobilityplatform.com/ – which is using Total 4.8.3, you just have to update to the latest version of the theme in order to see the settings from the Post Types Unlimited plugin

- AJ

Hi again

This was mentioned in the changelog basically in one of the updates I renamed FontAwesome to “Ticons” (theme icons) to prevent conflicts with 3rd party plugins loading different versions of the icon script causing icons to break. This way the icons used in the theme will always work.

If you are using CSS to add icons you have two choices:

1. Use a plugin or child theme code to load the fontawesome script on the site.

2. Run a search/replace on your CSS to change fontawesome to ticons

Example: https://cl.ly/0b8e44

But for your menu instead of using CSS you can use the Total shortcode for the icons – https://wpexplorer-themes.com/total/docs/adding-icons-menu-items/ – doing that would have prevented any issues when updating.

Let me know if you have any questions.

- AJ

Thank you AJ.

Actually, I had seen your changelog (as always) and changed to ticons on pages where I didn’t see the icons.

But I have been fooled by the fact that a second instance of Fontawesome was loaded by Visual Composer as seen on this test site waterfall : https://pnet.peponi.fr/VC-fontawesome.png

I hadn’t understood that I needed to replace “fontawesome” everywhere, and as the icons were showing I wasn’t aware.

Now it’s a mistery for me why this VC font doesn’t load anymore since I’ve changed host/domain … but I don’t bother as it’s OK thanks to your help

Michel

Hi Michel,

Yes, it would be a mystery as to why that extra font icon file was loading the only thing I can think of would be if you were using the WPBakery icon module, a tabs module with icons…or any other “non-Total” module that has icons.

You are never a bother, let me know if you have any other questions or issues!

- AJ

It would be ideal if you updated your site first, but no necessary I can look either way. It is midnight here though so I will likely be heading to bed but will check any pending tickets first thing tomorrow.

Please have a look at the important notice on the changelog though it can help with the update process: https://wpexplorer-themes.com/total/changelog/

- AJ

Hi AJ … just wondering if there was an update? We transferred this conversation to email / support ticket … most recently you asked for FTP access which I sent on Monday. The support ticket was about the p tag on custom 404 page, which you fixed, and then we started talking about this one. Thank you.

Hi James,

Thanks for the reminder, I’ll have a look in a sec. I’ve actually been trying to figure this out for the last few days and been trying to get some help from Events Calendar because no matter what I do, it always works on my local host but it’s just not working on your site I think it may be a bug in the plugin. Let me see if your FTP access does help – thanks for sending that!

- AJ

Hi,

This isn’t possible via the read more “button” because the button is completely separate from the actual excerpt function. The read more type link you mention are the ones “connected” to the actual excerpt. It is possible to enable this via a child theme tweak:

// Tweak excerpt arguments for post types grid
add_filter( 'wpex_excerpt_args', function( $args, $context ) {
    if ( $context == 'vcex_post_type_grid' ) {
        $args['readmore'] = true;
    }
    return $args;
}, 10, 2 );

The issue I just noticed is that it will apply to all post types grid so if you want to target a specific grid add an extra conditional to check the current page so it only gets added to the grid on that page. Make sense?

- AJ

Thank you AJ! I was looking for a way to show read more only if there was any content past the excerpt…your code here made me look into the snippet library again with another view and sure enough this time I found one that I could use for this I just updated the more tag into a link, similar to this: https://wpexplorer-themes.com/total/snippets/filter-wpex-excerpt/ Thanks!

Oh yes, good find. This is another way to do it (probably better)

- AJ

Hi,

This is AJ the theme author.

A 500 error can mean anything. It could be server related (outdated PHP, memory issues..etc), it could be plugin related (conflict with a plugin and newer version of the theme), issues with outdated versions of WordPress or it could be an issue with a child theme.

If your site is setup correctly for WordPress it shouldn’t show a generic 500 error but instead an actual error. Are you able to check your server error logs to see if anything is in there?

Now, if you want you can provide me FTP and WP logins and I can try updating for you to see what could be wrong. Or if you want to try yourself again you will want to first enable WP Debug – https://wpexplorer-themes.com/total/docs/enabling-wp-debug/ – so when you get an error instead of the generic 500 error you will see a notice explaining the issue, then if you understand the problem you can fix it, if not you can let me know so I can help.

Before updating though, make sure WordPress is up to date. You can also disable plugins during the update to ensure there aren’t any issues, then updating the bundled plugins after the theme updates (if it can successfully) and then enabling them 1 by 1 to see if any break the site.

Let me know how you want to proceed.

- AJ

I follow your steps and it seems to be ok, WP debug helps me a lot.

Thank you a lot for your help !

Awesome! Let me know if you do need any extra help, I’m here to help you

Hi,

I just replied to you. It seems your site is still loading old scripts. Be sure to clear all cache and re-minify all scripts.

- AJ

Hi Aj, Thank you so much for the reply. I am using w3 total cache, I tried to clear the cache and empty cache for the minify but it doesn’t help. I finally disabled the animation on the block and it is working again. Thank you again. Love your work.

Kenny

Hi Kenny,

I actually just replied to you I hadn’t noticed that you updated to a newer WPBakery plugin not yet included in Total. Total 4.9 with WPBakery 6.0+ support will be released this week. Please see my email reply

- AJ

Hi,

It’s probably from the sample data. You can easily change any Contact Form 7 field from inline text to a placeholder by simply adding “placeholder” inside the field or when creating new fields using the checkbox to use the default value as a placeholder. Example video: https://cl.ly/1113ab

More info on placeholder here: https://contactform7.com/setting-placeholder-text/

Let me know if you have any issues or followup questions,

- AJ

Knew it was pretty simple… Thank you!

So you added your files inside your child theme inside a “languages” folder and named them accordingly? (by the way there are default fr_FR.po and .mo files in the Total theme languages folder provided by another customer.

It seems like it is working, for example I see in your footer the searchbox has been translated correctly. Are there any specific strings you are missing?

- AJ

ps: This is one of the best plugins for site translation: https://wordpress.org/plugins/loco-translate/ (instead of having to put the .po files in your child theme).

You’re right : for visitors, website is in French, but the admin remains in English, i don’t get it…

So i believe the theme is translated (child theme), but wordpress remains in English although French is intalled and selected !

By the way, how do i have to name the files accordingly ?

Your file names should be something like fr_FR.po and fr_FR.mo

I didn’t realize you wanted the backend in French since you linked to the website I assumed you meant the front-end. For the backend you need to edit the language for your user. Go to Users click on your name to edit your user and here you can select your language.

- AJ

Hey Joh,

• For client work I highly recommend Flywheels service that allows you to setup the site for free and then transfer it to a client, it’s the easiest way to create a client site without messing with any billing and also share access to the site if needed in the future – https://getflywheel.com/why-flywheel/client-billing-transfer/ – feel free to use my affiliate link if you want when setting up client sites

• For a large Ecommerce site. If you intend to have a lot of traffic in the future I would recommend a scalable solution so you can start lower but upgrade the server as needed. Cloudways is a great solution for this (but from my experience it’s more hands on and you need to know server “stuff” since you can actually choose your hardware). If you want something more “managed” than WPEngine, Kinsta, Flywheel are all good solutions where you can start with a lower plan and expand as you need.

I am a bit biased towards WPEngine since I’ve been using them for many years and they have been around for a long time and have invested in a lot of projects so I don’t see them going anywhere. Also their custom plan allows your site to grow as much as needed.

Now…as your site gets big I would highly recommend CloudFlare as well (even with our custom WPEngine server we still pay an extra $200/month for a business plan on Cloudflare). The added speed and security is really worth it. The good thing about cloudflare is it also scales, so you can start with the smaller WPEngine plan and a free CloudFlare plan and scale accordingly. For example you could probably run with the lowest WPEngine plan and when traffic gets bigger upgrade the CloudFlare plan to the $20/month plan before having to upgrade the WPEngine server.

Whatever you do, I would really recommend chatting with someone from the hosting company you plan on switching to, they can give you some good advice on what you may need as well as you can get a feel for their support staff. Also make sure they offer free site migration so you don’t have to do that

- AJ

Hi AJ,

Wow, I’m going to copy and paste your reply and save it as a Google Doc! This is all really helpful information. (I’ll also include links to the WP Explorer hosting article and one for CloudFlare. I’m still trying to wrap my head around CloudFlare, but I was pretty sleep deprived yesterday.)

I’ve been leaning toward WPEngine for awhile. I’ll contact them and likely make the switch. I’ve grown weary of Site5 and feel like I’m wasting my money. I definitely want a hosting company that I can grow into over the long term.

I’ll also look into Flywheel.

Thanks again! ...Gotta ad (as a follow up edit) that I think Flywheel is a brilliant option for freelancers.

Jon

Always happy to help Jon, let me know if you have any other questions that I could possible help with! Switching hosts can be a pain and also a bit scary so anything I can do to help make things easier let me know.

- AJ

Hi there,

This is introduced by Wordpress in version 4.7.4 for security reasons:

Lets say you have a link on page a that goes to page b and the link has the target blank tag (external link) which means page b will open in a new tab, for some reason, this gives page b a slight control over page 1 allowing for javascript injection which could allow page b to download something to your device, intercept private data being sent, change cookies that are dropped, or redirect the reader to a different page of their choice.

The rel noopener noreferrer prevents this potential security concern. Of course sometimes you trust the other site so there is no need to add the tags, but because it’s such a big security concern WordPress applies it to all links automatically as most people do not know of the issue.

There may be plugins you can use to disable the noopener noreferrer (can definitely be disabled via code in a child theme) but it’s not something I feel comfortable recommending since security is such a big concern.

- AJ

Hi AJ, thanks for the info, i never heard of that !

My concern is about PR transmission between site A to site B (i won both and it’s one of the goal of those links)

Isn’t “Norefferer” tag suppose to break Page Rank transmission ?

The noreferrer tag has 0 effect on SEO but can affect your analytics if you are trying to track referrals from your link in analytics.

That said, a while back there was an update so only the noopener tag should be added not the norefferer, if you are still seeing the norefferer tag being added and WordPress is up to date, most likely you cached scripts on your browser and clearing your browser cache should fix that.

- AJ

Hi,

This is AJ the theme author. The only way to disable links would be to edit the file at vcex_templates/vcex_portfolio_grid.php and locate the following line:

$categories_output .= wpex_get_list_post_terms( $latts['show_categories_tax'], true, true );

and change the second “true” argument to “false”.

Now, this isn’t a good idea (yo manually alter the file). I added an option to control this for the next theme update (to be released later this week) – https://cl.ly/53fbed

So you can manually edit the file for the meantime and once updated edit the page to alter the module setting. Or I can use some CSS to simply disable clicking on the links:

.vcex-portfolio-grid .portfolio-entry-categories a { pointer-events: none; }

- AJ

Hi,

If you are using the Sidebar style mobile menu (opens from left or right) all the menu classes get the sidr-class- prefix added to allow CSS to run on the main menu without breaking the mobile menu.

So wherever you defined the itemhidden class you need to modify it a bit:

.itemhidden, .sidr-class-hidden { display: none !important; }

- AJ

thanks AJ as always spot on ! should have been able to find this one myself though—” well you gave me a small trick to redeem myself ”.sidr-class-itemhidden”

cheers!

Hehe Good catch!

Hi Aj,

I have two questions:

1. Is there any way to insert my login/registration link in top menu, very right but to keep my social icons, to be just like on the screenshot here > https://imgur.com/6fhwFMb

2. How to achieve this: before user is logged in, I want to see in my menu only login, something like here> https://www.veeam.com/ and after login, instead of LOGIN string, to show user’s name, like here > https://imgur.com/NCDBPRx

Thank you.

-Brando

Reminder

Hi Brando,

Sorry I didn’t see this comment for some reason. Thanks for the reminder, it moved your comment up into my unread messages dashboard.

1. The only way currently would be to wrap your login/registration links in a span with a custom classname and then position it absolutely with some custom CSS.

I’ll look and see if I can make it easier to add content before/after the social items in a future version. It’s a bit tricky now because the social is positioned absolutely so I will likely change this so that the topbar uses the flex box model instead and the social doesn’t need absolute positioning to be centered vertically.

2. If you want a link in the main menu for login/logout it’s a bit more complex because of how WordPress works you need to hook into the menu system in the backend. Total doesn’t have a built-in option for this (I’ll look into adding one though since I think a lot of customers would like that) so you would need to use a 3rd party plugin or child theme code.

I’m working on a Total update to release this weekend or Monday so I’ll see if it’s too much bloat to add this function in the theme (usually it’s best to use plugins for this sort of thing since most people don’t need it, having it in the theme becomes added “bloat” for most).

- AJ

Hi Michel,

This is simply because all the headings are set to display as “blocks” by default. You can use CSS to make them inline-blocks if you want:

body .vcex-heading { display: inline-block; }

I see why it could be weird having the design set to the inner element while the heading itself is a block with a link, but I do need to think about possibly changing things as it could cause issues with people’s potential customizations of the module.

Do you want to try adding the CSS about and see if it works better for you and if you have any issues elsewhere on the site with other headings? Thanks!

- AJ

Thank you AJ, don’t worry I’ll use css.

Hi,

This is Aj the theme author. To change the active color on your menu links simply log into WordPress and go to Appearance > Customize > Header > Menu and edit the value for the Link Color: Current Menu Item option

Here is a little video: https://cl.ly/fa7bda

- AJ

Hi Ben,

This is Aj the theme author.

So the theme has a section at the very top of the site called “Top Bar” which you can use to display social icons at the top of the site – https://wpexplorer-themes.com/total/docs/total-wordpress-theme-anatomy/

We have an example of this on some demos:

• http://total.wpexplorer.com/base/ (disabled on mobile)
• https://total.wpexplorer.com/adapt/ (enabled on mobile)
• https://total.wpexplorer.com/healthcare/ (enabled on mobile)

The display is controlled via the customizer visibility setting: https://cl.ly/863ba5

Of course you can place social options in other sections of the site if you prefer as well such as the sidebar/footer.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

- AJ

Hi Michel,

Hum…if it’s set in the Customizer it should be showing up for all items. Maybe there is a conflict with the custom post type. Is it ok if I reply to your previous ticket? I re-opened it so I can log in and look.

- AJ

Hello AJ,

Thank you very much for you help and recommendations.

I apologize for the trouble, I thought I had tried deactivating child theme, but apparently I had not.

I had customized some files in child theme some time ago when I didn’t know how to avoid it, so if really needed I’ll learn your tip about wp-mods.

I know you can’t remember individual cases, but in the future don’t hesitate to “kick me out” for this kind of problem and tell me to better check child customizations

Anyway, the portfolio template works fine and will nicely help as you said.

Thanks again,

Michel

Awesome! If you need any help moving customizations from a child theme file into a function just let me know!

- AJ