Be Excellent To Each Other

Any idea why images won't align centre when they have a caption?

I have another question (sadly not an answer, excited Nirejhenge):

Having just moved my blog from Blogger to Wordpress, is there any way I can quickly change every link (when I link to a Blogger tag, really) to the relevant Wordpress label?

In fact, as I have my .com, I'll be pointing it there anyway, so would only need to change 'tag' to 'label' in the links. Or am I fucked?

If you run it through the Wordpress importer will it not do that for you?

It's imported all the posts and comments. Are links another one? Is it smart enough to do that?

[edit] It can convert categories to tags. Might just do that.

Hmm mine are OK So I'm guessing its something to do with your templates style sheet, my caption bit in style.css looks like:



I'm no CSS or Wordpress guru though so might be barking up the wrong tree.

Hi folks,

I hope that somebody can help me with a question (perhaps @Jem ?)

Problem: I write about knitting patterns/projects, and I always give the same information at the end of each post. Or I try to. Sometimes I forget a bit, or give it in the wrong order. I'd love to be a bit more consistent, and though I could edit an old post to try and get the same formar the truth is I never do and when I do try I'll inevitably forget one day and then format it all differently, then copy that different one for the next six until I forget and it changes again.

So, what I'd like is a sort of little form I could fill in on the back end of wordpress with the fields I need so that it would output the formatting and fields the same way each time and I could insert it with a short code or whatever.

I'm sure there must be plugins for this, but I don't know what to search for in the plugins database. Any ideas what it might be called?

You're looking for a template, aren't you?

You might find Shortcoder useful. I use it a lot on ConsoleMAD - it just enables me to create snippets of content and then I just drop them in with a shortcode into my product pages. It also adds a button to the editor so that you can just pick from a list of your snippets and quickly insert it.

Am I? Maybe, I honestly don’t know the best way to do it.

I’ve made templates before when I’ve wanted to make pages that display content in a specific way (such as the header image and three lines of text for all of the posts of crafts I’ve made with Darwin, for example) but I’ve never used them with posts. All the content that goes before what I’m going to call the ‘post footer’ would be different in format, but if I can make a post template where I can use the area above the footer however I wish and format some dummy text to enter for the footer that would work.

I’ll have a look tonight! Ta Grim... x

Ooh, and Devilman! That also sounds brilliant. I’ll check that out this evening (apologies, you were posting at the same time as me do I almost missed your message x)

Russell tells me I’ve already set up some kind of shortcode snippet formatted for exactly this use. I have no idea where it is but I’ll look tonight.

Mimi, the way I'd do this is to use the built in WordPress 'Custom Fields', which allows you to set fields on a per-post basis. You can then fill them in one the relevant posts and automatically display those fields on a post in the single post template. This method would require a tiny bit of coding but am happy to help if you find your shortcode thingymabob doesn't do what you need.

Thank you, Jem! I don’t have a shortcode thingamajig as far as I can see. I may once have done, maybe on my old site. Or maybe Russell is thinking of something else, perhaps the custom fields. I know I did set up custom fields on my old website, years and years ago, but if I had them for this one they’ve disappeared.

I couldn’t find anything to do with this when I looked today so it either means I have deleted something, or Russell is speaking g about a previous incarnation of my site, or I’m just not seeing it.

So, I know I’ve done this in the past, so I’ll have a look to setting it up again with Russell’s help tonight and hopefully we’ll get that done with custom fields. If we get stuck with anything I’ll see if you have any advice, but I’m hopeful as if I know I managed it some ten or so years ago. Thank you! x

It may be that WordPress is hiding the custom fields input from you (which it does by default IIRC). On the Edit Post page, click the Screen Options tab top right, make sure that Custom Fields is ticked. This will at least show you the interface for adding them and then you can figure out if you need to add anything to your template or whatever. Good luck

No, I have it there, I just don’t have any previously set up custom fields in it. If there ever were any I seem to have deleted them

Hello!

A quick question which somebody may know the answer to.

In most (print) publishing software, when you set your column layout you can set it up so that your content can move continually from one column to the next, by which I mean if I set three columns and then write my text it will automatically flow from column 1, to column 2, to column 3, according to the height of the column block that I have set. Adjusting the column height after writing that piece allows me to have all columns ending at the same point on the page, moving the text in a way that is responsive to the height of the three columns.

So, is there a way of doing that in the Gutenberg blocks editor. I can set my column block up, and I can make it responsive to different devices (stacking them if being read on mobile, for example), but I can't write a continuous piece and have it balance automatically in my selected columns.

I'm sorry for not using the correct terms for what I am trying to say. I did Google, but I can't find anything (possibly because I don't know those same correct terms to begin with).

Not natively, that I'm aware of, because it'd be more of a display thing and the editor really handles the structure.

So e.g. you can replicate what you're trying to do in the frontend using the CSS column- stuff, e.g. if you had
and the CSS:


that'd do roughly what you want, but you'd have to enter it into a gutenberg block in one column.

Hope that makes sense...

Yes, that makes perfect sense. Thank you.

I’m surprised it’s not a built in formatting capability in the blocks, TBH, because it seems an obvious choice for column layouts.

I have two columns at present, with categories for recipes (I’m moving my little cookbook online, just for myself as I find it easier to refer/find things if I can just bring them up on my phone. The page isn’t publicly linked to from the front of the site, and though I’m sure anyone could find it if they went digging around for it, I doubt anyone is going to, but for the sake of my own sanity I want the columns to balance out when I add a new recipe category.

Also, because in mobile view the responsive design splits it, like so:

Hi folks,

my site has slowed down considerably. I haven't changed much other than updates and so on, and I wondered if one or more of my plugins could be to blame as I have just deactivated them all and the site is a bit faster.

I'm sure that each of them slows it down to some degree, but does anyone know if there is a 'usual suspect' in this list that might be the main culprit, and/or one or more I could probably do without?

Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection
Health Check & Troubleshooting
Image Hover Effects Block
Jetpack
Jetpack Boost
LiteSpeed Cache
Ninja Forms
Otter – Page Builder Blocks & Extensions for Gutenberg
WordPress Hide Posts
WP Cerber Security, Anti-spam & Malware Scan
WP Recipe Maker

I'm slowly reactivating them one by one to see if I can see if there is a noticeable slow down at any point, but I'm going off the very unscientific idea of how it feels, rather than an actual measure

Jetpack is the usual culprit - absolute pile of poop.

Not familiar with WP Cerber Security (and don't really rate any of the security plugins, that shit should be handled on the server) or Otter, though.

Who's your host?

I did wonder if Jetpack was to blame, but it just seems so ‘standard’ that I thought I must be wrong.

Cerber was recommended to me way back in the annals of time (maybe as much as 15 or 20 years ago) when somewhere was trying to brute force their way into my site. It may have been someone on the forum, or even my web host back then (which would have been a different one to the present) that recommended it. It would actually have been a different site altogether, at a different URL, but old habits…

I’m currently with UKHost4U, but my first site was hosted of some random guy’s back bedroom server.

OK, as long as it's not hosted with GoDaddy or similar we're likely all good there

It's might be worth checking with your host what sort of WAF (web application firewall) they have and if they do any login limiting etc because a lot of them do nowadays. If they're handling all that server side, you could likely ditch that plugin.

If you want to take a look at the nitty gritty going on in the background, see what's happening/where, you can play with Query Monitor (https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/query-monitor/) and that might give you some clues, but yeah... Jetpack is where I'd put my money.

If they're not doing any kind of WAF'ing or other security features though, ditch WP Cerber and install Wordfence instead. It's much better at blocking any kind of intrusions or attacks, and I'm not just saying that because they pay me

Super. Thank you both. I’ll have a sit down with it tonight.