Thursday, September 28, 2023

SEO – Clean Up Unused DIVI Project

Finishing off a DIVI WordPress site and refining the SEO. The first run through the SEO using Yoast Plugin I used Google’s “site:yourdomain.com, and made the URLs what I wanted. A few days later I was checking Google again to see the progress on the rankings and discovered Google had now indexed the DIVI Projects categories. The theme I was using had some sample projected that I ended up not using; however, they got indexed.

Final conclusion is if you are not using it get rid of it. In my case I was linking to pages I didn’t want public.

I hope this helps someone else out there…

DIVI CSS Changes Not Showing

While working with a template purchased from DIVICake the home page had 3 blurbs and I needed 4. I copied the modules from the third to a new 4 column and everything looked good. When I exited the page builder the new column and blurb were spaced wrong and other CSS styles were not working correctly.

After suffering some time I looked into DIVI’s caching and this fixed my issue. Here is the path.

DIVI >> Theme Options >> Builder >> Advanced     

Turn off “Static CSS Generation” till the site goes live.

I hope this helps someone else out there…

Change DIVI Contact Form Error Message.

Have a client that doesn’t want a comma in the standard DIVI error message: “Please, fill the following fields“. It would be nice for Elegant Themes to build this into their widget. I found my answer on the following page, but that page is gone.

I had to go into a actual file to change it. The file is located in “wpcontent >> themes >> divi >> includes >> builder >> framework.php“. It was around line 195. Changed it and uploaded to the site via FTP.

I hope this helps someone else out there….

HTML Entities In Gantry & WordPress

I was working in Ganty 5 for a Joomla site and decided to use Gantry for the WordPress blog. I had purchased some “Particles” from Inspiretheme.com. They have a WordPress particle they call Content Pro. It takes the articles and makes them blocks to show in the front page. It worked great; however, the titles were show the HTML Entities and not the character I wanted.

I contacted InspireTheme, but my subscription was over and they wanted me to resubscribe to get support. The fix seemed so easy; however, I didn’t know where to start. With some playing around I found what I was looking for. It turned to be the “content-pro-wordpress.html.twig” file located “wp-content/themes/g5_hydrogen/custom/particles/”. Here is what I needed to change.

{{- display.title.limit ? article.title|truncate_text(display.title.limit) : article.title -}}

Changed to:

{{- display.title.limit ? article.title|truncate_text|raw(display.title.limit) : article.title|raw -}}

What I had to change was to add “|raw” at the end of the variable. Twig is powerful and helpful, but still new to me. The following links were good help to helping me understand TWIG filters.

http://docs.gantry.org/gantry5/advanced/twig-filters

https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/318934/shortcode-returns-escaped-html-tags

I hope this helps someone else out there….

Moving Joomla Site To New Domain And SSL

Started to rebuild a customers site in Joomla but didn’t want to disturb the existing site we purchased a new CPanel Hosting package which gave us PHP 7. I got the site finished and approved but when I went to make the switch of the domain name to the desired name I noticed a dedicated IP in thehosting package. There were a lot of specific subdomains and uses for the such as a “Mail.mydomain.com”. This turned out to be for a SSL cert that was installed. Here are the steps it took and some of the pitfalls I ran into.

The SSL Certificate needed to be removed. In the “My Products” section of the Godaddy hosting scroll down to the SSL section. Click on “Mange”, but if you have more than one SSL make sure you end up in the correct one. I was ending up in the wrong one to fix it I would click on “All” in the upper left of the screen of the SSL Certificate’s detail page. I could then select the desired certificate and it allow me to “Rekey & Manage”.

Since the two hosting packages and domains were all with Godaddy it was easy to disassociate the SSL form the domain. I clicked on “Change the site that your certificate protects” and added a made up subdomain of “old.mydomain.com”, hit “save”, and then “Submit all Saved Changes”. I repeated this process to add it back to the new hosting package after the desired domain name was attached to the new hosting package with a sweet new site at the end of it.

Clicking the profile siloquette icon in the upper-right of the Godaddy dashboard and go to “My Products”. Select the old hosting to detach the domain name from the old hosting. This was an old package that listed “Hosted Domains” in the left-side menu. I clicked on that name ( I didn’t think was a hyperlink), and it brought me to a list of of a couple of domain names. I needed to wait almost a day for the SSL certificate to be disassociated with the domain. This was unusually long time to wait. It normally takes a few hours. I then clicked the checkbox next to the desired domain name and click “Change Primary”. I gave it a made up name of “old.mydomain.com” and clicked okay. Now to move the desired domain name to the new hosting package.

In Godaddy’s admin panel it seems fastest to use the icon the upper right and go to “my products” and this time select the new hosting package. In this new hosting page you will click on the “Change” button in the Account panel and select the desired domain. The last thing was go back the SSL certificate and change it to protect the desired domain again.

Overall an easy process; however, I run a WordPress blog as a subdomain and of course use perma-stinks. Once the main site was moved over the wordpress site broken in a couple of ways, and it was difficult to log into the admin panel. This was a quick fix by going into the database table “wp-options” and change the “siteurl” and the “home” to the new domain. I had a couple of other Joomla site as subdomains that came back up fine.

I hope this helps someone else out there…

WordPress Divi Footer From Search Engines Yoast

Working on new WordPress site using the Divi theme. I had found a video on creating a custom footer by creating a page and that page becomes an element you can save in your Divi library to be reused. I made a footer and added to each page.

The problem came when I was reviewing the analytics after a month. “Footer” was one of the pages listed by Google and indexed by Google.

I discover that I can disable search engines from tracking the Divi Elements / Pages. Go to that element / page. In my case it was the “Footer” element. This element is a page built with the Divi builder. This is what it looked like.

At the top of the page is my Yoast settings. There are 3 tabs on the left side. Click on the gear icon and you will see where to turn this off.

 

I hope this helps someone else out there….

 

 

WordPress Akeeba – Ajax Loading Error

I was restoring a WordPress website using Akeeba kickstart in my WAMP environment. I got the following error.

I moved over to XXAMP I got site installed; however, my SendMail isn’t set up in XXAMP so I couldn’t test the forms. I wanted to restore the site in WAMP.

Ran the Akeeba Kickstart again and this time I choose to run the files restore “directly” and “ignore most errors”.

The website installed, but while working on the site I discovered a lot of odd things. None of my Widgets or Widget positions were available in the dashboard.

I ran the install again, but this time I did not check “Ignore most errors”. This is installed correctly this time.

I hope this helps someone else out there…

 

Using Built-in Font Awesome Fonts In DIVI

Divi theme has some built in icons that you can call in a style sheet such as the following:

.someclass:before {
font-family: “ETmodules”;
content: “\6c”;
}

This will give me the icon of a pad and pencil.

I originally got this tip from Josh Hall on YouTube. Thanks for sharing Josh!

This issue I had was being able to figure out the code number for which Icon. The code numbers do not match Font Awesome font codes.

I finally found Elegant Themes cheat sheet for these icons.

The Elegant Icon Font – 360 Of The Best Free Icons For The Modern Web

I hope this helps someone else out there…

 

Elegant Themes DIVI – Custom 404 Page

I had a customer complain about not being able to reach the new site we just finished. They were getting a 404 page not found page. This is because Google has the old pages indexed.

First I added the website to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools so I could get the ball rolling on getting the old URL’s removed from their index.

Second, I got working on creating a custom 404 page. The following article helped me understand how to do this in DIVI.

Build a custom 404 / page not found template

It took about 30 minutes start to finish to get this working.

I hope this helps someone else out there…