There appears to be a bug in Polylang that causes this core WordPress check:

get_query_var( 'taxonomy' )

To return “language” instead of the actual taxonomy name for the archive.

I’m trying to read through the Polylang code to see where the issue is so I can report it to the plugin developers.

But I have tweaked my code a bit which will also fix the issue.

I will be releasing Total 6.4 later this week and it has the fix, if you want to fix your site manually for the meantime it’s very easy! Here are the steps:

1. Log into WordPress and go to Plugins > Plugin File Editor. 2. Select the Total Theme Core plugin on the top right. 3. Browse to inc > term-thumbnails.php – https://a.cl.ly/wbugjdYG 4. Scroll to the bottom of the file and locate this code:

private static function get_current_taxonomy(): string {
    $taxonomy = \get_query_var( 'taxonomy' );
    if ( ! $taxonomy ) {
        if ( \is_category() ) {
            $taxonomy = 'category';
        } elseif ( \is_tag() ) {
            $taxonomy = 'post_tag';
        }
    }
    return $taxonomy;
}

Change to:

private static function get_current_taxonomy(): string {
    if ( \is_category() ) {
        $taxonomy = 'category';
    } elseif ( \is_tag() ) {
        $taxonomy = 'post_tag';
    } else {
        $taxonomy = \get_query_var( 'taxonomy' );
    }
    return $taxonomy;
}

Like this: https://a.cl.ly/OAuy0165 (file editing is disabled on my server so it shows an error, but as long as it’s not disabled on your site it should work).

I’ve tested and confirmed it works after making that change: https://a.cl.ly/NQuXLm5E

Thank you for reporting the issue and your extra feedback to help me fix the issue!

- AJ

This code helped me. Now the picture is displayed. I will wait for the update. Thank you very much!

Thank you for confirming it’s working for you and thank you again for reporting the bug! Hopefully the update will be out sooner than later, I’m trying hard to get it out asap.

Hi again – I also fixed the messed up feature boxes by using the “code-y” field name. So I do think there is some issue with using the ACF names in shortcodes in repeaters.

Oh yes, sorry I forgot about that!

The reason you need to use the ACF field ID and not just the name is for optimization reasons. The theme will only run it’s extra checks for ACF fields when the name uses the ACF format. This is to keep things much more efficient when getting field data for non acf fields. If I coded things differently it would have to always make extra checks for ACF event when it’s not an ACF field. So I think I will keep things as I’ve done it to ensure the theme is as efficient as possible.

The best fix would be to update the {{acf_field_name}} dynamic variable to work in this context so I will do that.

I also forgot…You could just use the ACF shortcode as well: https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/shortcode/ – this should work correctly (and be more efficient) as it’s calling the acf plugin directly.

- AJ

I took another look at my code and wanted to followup.

Currently the code uses acf_is_field_key() to determine whether a field is an ACF field. It’s a very efficient function, but it only works when the input is an ACF-formatted field key (e.g., field_6826f9b83277d) — not when using a generic field name.

I reviewed the ACF plugin code and couldn’t find any built-in method to check if a custom field exists based solely on the field name.

Since ACF supports custom fields across various contexts — taxonomies, option pages, custom post types, and more — relying only on the general field name would require checking the context each time a field is requested. That would involve determining the type (taxonomy, post type, etc.), attempting to locate the ACF field definition, and, if that fails, falling back to a standard WordPress custom field lookup.

If the requested field isn’t an ACF field, all that extra logic would run needlessly. By requiring the use of the ACF field key format, the lookup process stays much more efficient and avoids unnecessary overhead.

Now, if you were not aware, you can easily display acf field keys in the dashboard: https://a.cl.ly/Wnu9DxkD

- AJ

I’ve made the improvements to the lightbox and also fixed accessibility issues with the thumbnails. There are quite a few files to update. I will likely push out an update at the end of the week or next week. But if you want I can send the beta version sooner, please share an email address I can contact you at or if you want to renew your support license you can submit a private ticket here – https://my.totalwptheme.com/

Thanks for the update AJ! If you could send the beta version to scott@sporulate.com, that would be much appreciated.

Thanks so much for everything!

Scott

I’ll shoot you an email right now.

- AJ

Did you add anything in the Sub-Menu Location field? Also make sure the Menu Position doesn’t have anything “weird”.

If you can’t get it working please open a ticket and send me the site logins so I can see – https://my.totalwptheme.com/

Hi AJ

I worked it out. It was because the auto-generated Name (post type key) exceeded 20 characters. I manually reduced it and it now appears in the menu.

Thanks

James

Ah, I will need to add a check in the JS to provide a warning if the auto generated name is too long. Good catch!

- AJ

Hi,

I don’t generally recommend adding images in the menu (for various reasons – which I can go into if you want) which is why I don’t offer the option. But technically you can insert HTML into the WordPress menu item label text, so you can add an image like such:

<img src="IMAGE_URL" />

Example: https://a.cl.ly/z8uWPq45

And if you need to display something different on mobile it would be possible, let me know if that’s something you want to do. But you’ll need to share the URL so I can see how the site is setup.

- AJ

Oh, I already had this snippet – https://totalwptheme.com/docs/snippets/dynamic-templates-prevent-editor-access/ – which is probably better as it’s slimmer.

Thanks AJ, the snippet works great. Could the same be done for Custom Cards? The reason for this is so my client, who will be adding content themselves, does not have access to any design elements at all, adding content is through ACF fields only. (To prevent them fiddling with design, which clients sometimes like to do!)

The snippet is the same just rename “register_wpex_templates_post_type_args” to “register_wpex_card_post_type_args”. But you can optimize things but bringing the function out and using it for both hooks. Ex:

function james_hide_templates_and_cards_from_editors( $args ) {
    if ( is_admin() && ! current_user_can( 'edit_theme_options' ) ) {
        $args['show_ui'] = false;
    }
    return $args;
}
add_filter( 'register_wpex_templates_post_type_args', 'james_hide_templates_and_cards_from_editors' );
add_filter( 'register_wpex_card_post_type_args', 'james_hide_templates_and_cards_from_editors' );

This is a core WordPress hook/filter – https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/register_post_type_post_type_args/

Hi AJ – it’s a dynamic template – so the option isn’t showing. If you can provide the code that would be awesome, I would prefer it not to show up completely rather than hide with CSS.

Here is a sample snippet:

add_filter( 'vcex_maybe_display_shortcode', function( $check, $shortcode_tag, $shortcode_atts ) {
    if ( 'vcex_image' === $shortcode_tag && isset( $shortcode_atts['source'] ) && 'featured' === $shortcode_atts['source'] ) {
        $meta_check = get_post_meta( get_the_ID(), 'CUSTOM_FIELD_NAME', true );
        if ( $meta_check && 'CUSTOM_FIELD_VALUE_TO_CHECK' === $meta_check ) {
            $check = false;
        }
    }
    return $check;
}, 10, 3 );

So you can see we are hooking into the ‘vcex_maybe_display_shortcode’ which controls whether a theme element should display or not. Then we check to ensure it’s set to display the featured image. Then we check if a custom field exists and if it’s a specific value and if so we return false for the display.

Be sure to edit CUSTOM_FIELD_NAME and CUSTOM_FIELD_VALUE_TO_CHECK accordingly.

- AJ

ps: I have considered adding some sort of “Conditional Display” option to the theme’s elements so you can choose when it should or shouldn’t display, but it’s not something most customers would ever need so it feels like a lot of added bloat. But I’m still open to it…just not sure the best way to implement, as customers may not want to hide items not only based on custom fields but also based on category, tag, taxonomy, post type…etc.

Lovely, thanks!

Hi Paul,

Under the Query tab for the Post Cards element you can change the “Order By” option to “random” and then of course set the number of posts to 1. But it’s not recommended for couple reasons.

1. You will need to disable all server caching on the page that displays the random entry so that the database is called every time the page is visited so it can truly be random.

2. Displaying a random post is a very resource intensive query, it’s actually disabled on many hosting companies by default such as WPEngine.

You should only do this if the website is specifically for members where all viewers are logged in.

The only “ideal” way, would be to code your own custom function that renders the post cards element on page load via ajax. This wouldn’t be to hard, but it will send a request every time someone visits the page which isn’t great plus it means the page will initially load with an empty space as it sends the ajax request to display the card. The way you would go about it is by adding the Post Cards element to your page then looking in code mode so you can copy the shortcode to insert into your custom function that renders it via ajax – I could help with the full code if needed (chatGPT can probably give it to you as well) but I wouldn’t recommend doing this unless the client absolutely requires it.

- AJ

Here is the updated version of the video element: https://a.cl.ly/llubnWdK (which will be in the next official update) – which you can extract and replace under plugins/total-theme-core/inc/vcex/shortcodes/ – this renames the “Title” field to “Video Description” and it’s available for both the iFrame and Self-hosted videos.

Let me know if you have issues with that.

Now, the “Iframe Title or Iframe Extra URL Parameters.” settings only will display when using the iFrame video type: https://a.cl.ly/Wnu9l8mJ

But again, if you update the file with the one provided above the “iFrame Title” field has been renamed to “Video Description”.

- AJ

Hi AJ,

Thank you! I changed it from YouTube to iframe video type and was able to add in a title attribute. Thank you again for your help! I really appreciate it.

You are right, I should make sure the field displays when selecting Youtube and Vimeo as well. Good catch!

If it’s a Youtube video though, you can instead use “WordPress oEmbed” and the title will be automatically pulled from YouTube so you don’t need to do extra work. The purpose of having the separate YouTube and Vimeo settings is to allow extra customization if needed.

Overlap blocks, using minus settings for top margin, helps to create a conjoined look. I can only assume there is some peculiar coding clash somewhere for the dashboard block view editor to show left align wrap images way off outside the editorial frame. It’s been like that for some years and no updates change it.

Hi,

I hope you had a nice weekend and if you celebrate it, 5 de Mayo.

I’m going to try and reply to all unanswered questions as I’m reading through your comments I can see you have changed some things so some questions no longer pertain. But if you have any other unanswered questions please let me know!

I’m hoping I might be able to move the social icons to float alongside the top bar menu or header menu centred one day. Not sure yet if it’s possible or whether it suits my design yet. You can easily icons into your menu by using the icon shortcode as I’ve done for this demo – https://totalwpthemedemo.com/nouveau/ – the following documentation explains how to do that (last section): https://totalwptheme.com/docs/adding-icons-menu-items/

That’s if you want icons “in” the menu. If you just want them side-by-side, what you would do is use a “Flex Container” in the page builder and insert your menu and social links into the flex container so that they display side by side. This could be a bit complex though if you are also showing an Off Canvas on mobile, you would likely need to create 2 flex containers (one for desktop with the horizontal menu and social links and one for mobile with the off canvas menu and social links) to achieve the look you want.

Have found the background image setting for page header title. Yes it makes the header title easier to read, clever thanks, but seems make the whole header wider/deeper which I prefer it not to be

I’m not sure what you mean by “wider/deeper”, if you are referring to the height, this style has a default height of 400px which can be changed in the customizer: https://a.cl.ly/X6uLlrwv

If what you are referring to is that the background “stretches” this is because it will use a “cover” style background to ensure it’s responsive across all screen sizes. You can use the “Full Width” setting at the top of the Page Title tab in the Customizer (see last screenshot) and it will keep your title centered. But I depending on the design it could look weird, a better solution could be to use a boxed site layout and constrain everything: https://totalwptheme.com/docs/theme-layouts/ – this way the title won’t

Will there be a control for making the page header background image less dark

You can already control the opacity of the overlay in the Customizer here: https://a.cl.ly/z8uWr7zB – you can also use the custom overlay background setting to change it so it’s not “black”. You also have even more control when choosing a custom color, as you can also define an opacity for the color itself there.

off canvas menu seems to have some controls, but delete/not show menu icon seems to elude me.

The whole purpose of the off-canvas menu is so that you click a button and it opens a mobile version of the menu. Hiding the icon that is used to trigger the off-canvas menu would make the whole element useless. So I’m not understanding the question. Here is an example of a basic custom header pattern: https://totalwptheme.com/pattern/header-1/ – notice how on small screens the Horizontal Menu is hidden and the Off Canvas menu is visible. If you want to display the same horizontal menu on all devices, then you would not ever insert the Off-Canvas element, unless you want to create a design like this – https://totalwptheme.com/pattern/header-1/ – which features both a horizonal menu and an off-canvas menu (popular on magazine style sites).

Slider Revolution

This plugin is intended for creating slides, not a custom header. I mean you could use it for that but I would never recommend it. In fact I don’t really recommend using any sliders on modern sites. This plugin is only included because it always has been. You can learn about licensing here – https://totalwptheme.com/docs/bundled-product-license/

Here is a good read on sliders and why you shouldn’t use them if interested: https://yoast.com/opinion-on-sliders/

So if you delete the Slider Revolution plugin and won’t use it, you can also disable the installation notices like such: https://totalwptheme.com/docs/disable-bundled-plugin/

the snag with having to edit in dynamic template and the further settings is you can’t see the effect of what you are doing

I’m not sure what you mean, are you not using the WPBakery front-end editor? Or perhaps you are using the front-end editor, but the concern you are having is that you are only seeing the template content and not the whole site as well?

It seems impossible to simply add an image and wraparound text to anything/inside a block/para

If you are using the page builder you can do it with a text block like such: https://a.cl.ly/L1ulr4nG

Now, I don’t know what context you are referring to. But you should never use any page builder for “posts” as it creates a lock in effect. For your posts (like blog posts) you should just use the classic editor or Gutenberg (I prefer the later). And in both you can easily float images to the side. If you are using Gutenberg and aren’t sure how this is how: https://a.cl.ly/YEuYOm56

Gutenberg does seem to have a bug in the editor where it looks like it makes the content full-width and the image is outside, but the front-end will display correctly. This is a bug in the editor – I’ve tested and confirmed it happens with any theme. Hopefully WordPress will fix this some day.

That said, having text wrap around images is a bit old-school and isn’t really done these days. It often causes issues on phones and it can make text harder to read, so it’s generally avoided. Perhaps this is why it’s getting fixed…

- AJ

Dear AJ, Thank you very much for all this information! I shall digest it all in stages and no doubt will trial run various edits as suggested. Interesting about the wraparound bug edit problem. Many thanks again, what a massive knowledge you have. I can only learn via trial and error. best wishes, V

Hi,

The theme itself doesn’t auto check anything and the only changes for WooCommerce done in the them were the CSS changes so the update itself couldn’t have changed that behavior (very weird). Of course if you want to see if it’s a theme issue or not you can go to the theme Panel and disable the option named “WooCommerce Integration” which removes all the theme files and code associated with WooCommerce.

I tested on a sample site and the setting is working as expected for me: https://a.cl.ly/v1uz4yRG

I dug into the WooCommerce code to see how this works and the code for checking the input is in the templates/checkout/form-shipping.php file – https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/blob/23d1d8f0ec2dda88c8e3512d26097a0d1a6b890f/plugins/woocommerce/templates/checkout/form-shipping.php#L26 – this file is not modified inside the Total theme.

Perhaps you will want to double check to ensure this file is not being modified via your child theme and needs updating. I also see there is a filter ‘woocommerce_ship_to_different_address_checked’ that can be used to override the setting. The theme doesn’t modify this hook, but it’s possible your child theme or a 3rd party plugin on your site is modifying it. You may want to try disabling 3rd party WooCommerce add-ons to test as well.

Regarding your other concern…By default, the page should refresh when fields aren’t filled out so it will go to the top of the page like this: https://a.cl.ly/7KulbxgJ

If you want it to scroll to the notice box instead you can enable the default WooCommerce functionality for that, there is a setting in the theme as this is disabled by default: https://totalwptheme.com/docs/enable-scroll-to-notices-for-the-woocommerce-checkout/ – perhaps you need to enable this for things to work as expected.

If enabling the option isn’t working, it’s possible there are some issues with the Paypal add-on. In my opinion, if the the form is missing fields it shouldn’t even let you open Paypal. Perhaps this is something to mention to the plugin developers?

- AJ

Thanks Aj, I disabled Theme Woocommerce integration and still had the option for a different address ticked – MMMM i’m sure this behaviour changed on theme update – BUT obviously NOT – so will have to investigate further – Thanks Turns out it was the fright shipping quote plugin , that I had updated the day before – !!!! sorry about that – I usually check after updates – BUT must have missed that …... But thanks for the support and looking into it

I enabled the scroll to top notice in the theme and now it does scroll to the top of the page and shows the errors – which is exactly how i wanted it to work – so i think from a customer point of view this works much better highlighting the issue Thanks for pointing me in the right direction for that issue

I will reach out to PayPal as you say – the popup should not even open if there is missing info – rather than Open and on the phone cover the entire screen and then after a while – stop and show errors – Minor issue really as it does not show the login page and NOW goes straight the the error heading and highlighting the fields in red is/should be very clear now to the customer

THANKS

Great! Thanks for the update

Hi,

If you want an AJAX filter than you would want to use the advanced ajax function – https://totalwptheme.com/docs/snippets/advanced-ajax-filter-example/

To create your “accordion” you would do just need to add the proper HTML. I assume if you want to display parents that can be expanded to show children you are probably going to be adding this to a sidebar so it’s vertical and you probably don’t want the parent categories filterable. So the best way is using the modern html details element – https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/details

Here is a basic example based on my snippet (I actually had chatGPT write this for me):

function woo_cards_product_filter_shortcode( $atts ) {
    if ( ! function_exists( 'totalthemecore_call_non_static' ) ) {
        return;
    }

    // Load AJAX filter scripts
    totalthemecore_call_non_static( 'Vcex\Ajax', 'enqueue_scripts' );

    // Get target grid ID from shortcode attribute
    $target = isset( $atts['target'] ) ? $atts['target'] : '';

    if ( empty( $target ) ) {
        return;
    }

    // Get all parent categories in 'product_cat' taxonomy
    $parent_terms = get_terms( [
        'taxonomy'   => 'product_cat',
        'hide_empty' => false,
        'parent'     => 0,
    ] );

    ob_start();
    ?>

    <div class="woo-cards-product-filter" data-vcex-ajax-filter="1" data-vcex-ajax-filter-target="<?php echo esc_attr( str_replace( '#', '', $target ) ); ?>" data-vcex-ajax-filter-multiple="0">

        <?php if ( ! empty( $parent_terms ) && ! is_wp_error( $parent_terms ) ) : ?>
            <?php foreach ( $parent_terms as $parent ) :

                // Get child terms
                $child_terms = get_terms( [
                    'taxonomy'   => 'product_cat',
                    'hide_empty' => false,
                    'parent'     => $parent->term_id,
                ] );

                if ( empty( $child_terms ) || is_wp_error( $child_terms ) ) {
                    continue;
                }
                ?>

                <details class="woo-filter-group">
                    <summary><?php echo esc_html( $parent->name ); ?></summary>
                    <ul class="wpex-mt-5 wpex-ml-10 wpex-list-none">
                        <?php foreach ( $child_terms as $child ) : ?>
                            <li><a href="#" class="theme-txt-link" data-vcex-type="product_cat" data-vcex-value="<?php echo esc_attr( $child->term_id ); ?>">
                                <?php echo esc_html( $child->name ); ?>
                            </a></li>
                        <?php endforeach; ?>
                    </ul>
                </details>

            <?php endforeach; ?>
        <?php endif; ?>

        <!-- Reset Button -->
        <button class="theme-button" data-vcex-type="reset">Reset Filter</button>

    </div>

    <?php
    return ob_get_clean();
}
add_shortcode( 'woo_cards_product_filter', 'woo_cards_product_filter_shortcode' );

Usage:

[woo_cards_product_filter target="YOUR_GRID_ID"]

Sample video: https://a.cl.ly/Kou5lQrJ

- AJ

ps: I think using the details element is better, but you could instead modify this code to use the theme’s vcex_toggle_group and vcex_toggle_shortcodes for the output. Really you can anything, since it’s just basic HTML – the important thing for the filters to work is the data attributes.

ps: I edited the snippet above, there was an extra ”#” in data-vcex-ajax-filter-target which shouldn’t be there – a mistake by chatGPT that I didn’t catch.

Hi,

This is AJ the theme author.

So first of all, no theme should ever have an AMP version of the theme, this is plugin territory. You really should use a plugin to add AMP support to your site and any plugin will work with any theme.

Now, AMP is quite old school and not really recommended anymore. There are several reasons for this and I can post them here if you’d like. But generally speaking, AMP is not recommended by top experts anymore. It’s more important to focus on responsive design & Core Web Vitals (which will mostly be dependent on your hosting).

If anything, what you would want to consider is using a plugin to convert your site to a progressive web app – these plugins will also work with any theme, but could be limited by your server. Also, depending on the site it could be completely useless. For your site specifically, it wouldn’t make any sense to set it up as a PWA (or even have an AMP version for that matter).

- AJ

Hi,

You’ll need to be a bit more specific what you mean by “advanced animations and page styling options” – it’s possible what you are looking for is already included in the theme. These are 2 very different things and specifically when it comes to “page styling options” I’m confused because you can literally style anything in the theme and create templates for anything section of the site, so you have full control over the page styling.

Regarding animations specifically, many site animations are now considered somewhat “old school” (not modern). In fact, most modern websites tend to avoid animations, as they often rely on extra scripts that can slow down performance, negatively impact SEO (depending on how they’re implemented), and create accessibility issues for some users.

That said, some animations could be ok such as micro-interactions or subtle transitions. Things that may be possible already in the theme.

Feel free to email me directly to wpexplorer [at] gmail dot com if you wanted to share some examples from other sites/themes of what you are referring to.

- AJ

ps: Total is also fully compatible with Elementor and Elementor Pro – older customers that have been using WPBakery for a long time may not be aware of this. And Elementor does have not only many built-in animation functions (in the pro version) but there are also many free and premium add-ons for Elementor you can use for added animations. But again, depending on what you want to do, it may not be ideal to do so.

Hi James,

You can write your own shortcode for this, but you can also just use the Post Cards element, use the “Post Content” card style and under the Query tab you can use the ‘Query Specific Posts’ field to define the post to display.

- AJ

Hi,

This demo has a custom logo text which is defined and can be changed under Appearance > Customize > Header > Logo > Logo Text.

The reason why I used this specific field for this demo (rather then having it automatically pull the site name) is because I wanted the dot between the words. If you just leave that field blank it will pull your site title as defined in WordPress under Settings > General.

- AJ

Hi AJ, I do give the specific field with the Logo Text, how can I give h1 tag to the Logo text? Thank you.

HI,

It’s very bad for SEO to set your logo to an h1 heading. I can give you some custom code you can use to do this, but I would not recommend it at all – this will hurt you more then help.

Now, this demo itself doesn’t have an h1 on the homepage, so you may want to add one. Simply edit the homepage with the page builder and insert the theme’s Heading element which you can set to an H1 and give it a good h1 based on your website, generally this would not be the same as your logo.

I didn’t add one to the demo as it wouldn’t look very good and it’s not usually needed for most sites, of course it can help with SEO to add one.

- AJ

Hi,

This demo has a custom logo text which is defined and can be changed under Appearance > Customize > Header > Logo > Logo Text.

The reason why I used this specific field for this demo (rather then having it automatically pull the site name) is because I wanted the dot between the words. If you just leave that field blank it will pull your site title as defined in WordPress under Settings > General.

- AJ

Hi,

Can you share the URL so I can have a look?

From what it sounds like, you have the posts set to display the full post content on the archives and the Ultimate Member plugin displays a notice when the post content is rendered to display a login message if the user is not logged in, but it doesn’t have the proper checks for when posts are loaded via AJAX.

Have you already tried contacting the plugin developers to see if there is a built-in setting or fix for this?

Now, of course one way to easily “fix” this would be to only display excerpts on the archives so the user needs to click a button to go to the full post where they will see the login notice. Generally you wouldn’t want to display the full post content on the archive anyway – of course this depends on the site and context.

Now, if all your posts were restricted to members then it would be very easy to setup a custom template where if the user wasn’t logged in they would see a notice otherwise they would see the posts. This could be done via a dynamic template – https://totalwptheme.com/docs/dynamic-templates/ – here is a quick sample video: https://a.cl.ly/wbudWd4o

If you wanted to do the above recommendation, while having both private and public posts, you could do so by adding the member posts into a specific tag or category. Then you can use this add-on – https://wordpress.org/plugins/term-based-dynamic-post-templates-for-total/ . This plugin will allow you to have a global dynamic template while also creating a separate one specifically for the member only posts tag/category.

Displaying a single notice for anyone logged out rather then the posts and a notice on each one would likely look better. Of course the downside to this is that you wouldn’t be able to categorize/tag them into other categories/tags. In which case, the other consideration is to use a custom post type for all the member-based posts to keep them completely separate from the public blog – this is most common.

One thing I do want to mention though, most WordPress hosting and optimization plugins do not cache AJAX requests. This means functions like load more or infinite scroll will always make the request to the server and can be much slower and put on more stress on the server. Standard pagination is the best for SEO and speed and generally recommended.

- AJ

Hi James,

There is definitely a bug in the Image Banner element, it’s basically ignoring the height 212 so it’s cropping proportionally. I’ve fixed this for the upcoming 6.3 update.

If you want to patch the issue yourself it’s quite simple!

Edit the file located at plugins/total-theme-core/inc/vcex/templates/vcex_image_banner.php and locate line 183:

'height' => $att['img_height'] ?? '',

Where you see $att it should be $atts.

Here is a video showing how you can edit it in the WP admin if you have the plugin editor enabled: https://a.cl.ly/9ZuOjOmv

Sorry for the troubles and thank you for reporting the issue!

- AJ

Hi,

This is AJ the theme author.

I’m not seeing any issues on the site, can you be more specific?

Now, I do see that your site is using WP-Rocket, perhaps you simply needed to clear your WP-Rocket settings?

If you want access to private support you can renew your support license and submit a ticket here – https://my.totalwptheme.com/ – otherwise if you want to share screenshots you can easily do it by uploading them online and sharing the link here. You can use Google Docs, Dropbox or Imgur to share screenshots here in the public forum.

- AJ

ps: If you are using WP-Rocket I do recommend you check out this guide – https://totalwptheme.com/docs/wprocket-setup-recommendations/ – it can help prevent issues when updating.

Hi AJ,

Yes I restored the website to a previous state because the errors were untenable. You’re right to suggest clearing WP-rocket cache and we did to no avail. You can see how it affected the menus here:

Other main content boxes were narrowed by maybe 50%. Any suggestions are appreciated.

Hi,

The issue with the icons would suggest a caching issue (of course hard to know without actually updating and inspecting the updated site). When updating to Total 6.0+ the icons have all been modernized to use SVG’s – https://totalwptheme.com/docs/changelog/6-0/ – if they are rendering large like your screenshot, it would suggest that your site is not loading the new CSS for the SVG based icons which ensures they display at the same font size as the text where they are rendered. The issue in the screenshot could also be caused if the page is showing cached HTML but the CSS is updated.

I’m not sure which “main content boxes” you are referring to, but I do see you are using full width WPBakery rows on the site, which the theme uses advanced CSS to render. There was a known WP-Rocket issue (not sure if they’ve fixed it since) which could cause full-width rows to not render properly if the theme’s CSS files were minified by WP-Rocket as the plugin was incorrectly changing 0px to 0 in the theme’s CSS. This could cause content to not render at their proper width.

I would recommend first making sure WP-Rocket is setup as per the docs – https://totalwptheme.com/docs/wprocket-setup-recommendations/ (this should only take a couple minutes).

Then after updating, be sure to fully clear your site cache and browser cache.

From inspecting your site headers, I can also see you are using CloudFlare as a CDN. It’s very possible you cleared WP-Rocket but not cloudFlare. So make sure to also clear CloudFlare.

Most WordPress hosting solutions also have their own cache you need to clear – so be sure to do that if applicable.

So…update, then clear WP-Rocket, then clear your hosting cache (if applicable), then clear CloudFlare cache, then clear browser cache. In this specific order.

If you do have issues after that, let me know so I can inspect the site.

If there are concerns with having issues updating a live site and waiting for assistance, you could always create a staging version of your site and update the staging version. This way any issues can be sorted out before updating the live site.

Now, I am releasing Total 6.3 most likely tomorrow, so you may want to wait and proceed with the update after that version is released so you don’t have to update twice.

- AJ

ps: I had a quick look at your child theme and didn’t see any CSS that would cause issues with updating per-se. However, I see some CSS that is targeting dynamic classes such as the following CSS:

.vc_section.vc_custom_1631169663711.wpex-vc_section-has-fill.wpex-vc-row-stretched.bg-fixed-top{padding:0px!important}

or 

.vc_custom_1663783762176 h2{font-size:37px!important;margin-top:0px!important}

The “vc_custom_{uniqid}” classes are generated dynamically, which means they can change if you edit the element or even the page.

When targeting specific rows or elements make sure to give them unique classnames or ID’s and reference those in you custom CSS.

There are a few other problematic declarations in the child theme such as:

h1{color:#fff!important}

This code will make it impossible to modify the color of an h1 added via a theme element such as the heading element as well as override the customizer setting under Customize > Typography > H1> Color.

These sort of declarations could cause confusion for others using the site and thinking certain settings are broken.

This may not be a concern depending how the site is managed, but it’s worth mentioning since I did notice it.