Jesse Owens

Hi Joe-

We’ll certainly try! We’ll follow up here publicly once our team finds what’s causing the 505 error.

Thanks for that information, Joe, that will help us out a lot trying to nail this down. I’ll update you here as soon as we have more info.

Hi Joe-

No worries! I’ll try to answer each of your questions.

What is the difference between wp_options and wpak_options.

There’s no functional difference. Some web hosts may change the “database prefix” from the default wp_ to something else, like wpak_ in your case, for an additional layer of security against automated hacking attempts that use the default database prefix.

By simply excluding the database/wpak.options, this will not change my staging Crio theme back to Grid One from my existing site?

The reason that we’re excluding the options table is because your theme customizations are in that table, and the options for Grid One and Crio are different. If you include that table, your customizations from Grid One will get moved over to Crio (and vice-versa), and may cause unexpected changes to your site’s appearance.

Spinning wheel for about 15 seconds resulting in message: Could not reach the URL address. HTTP error 505

I’ve never seen a 505 error on a transfer before, and I personally transfer backups to and from InMotion and Cloud WordPress pretty frequently. It’s conceivable this might be caused if your backup file is very large and the download is timing out, but the fact that you mentioned it happens after only 15 seconds seems to contradict that theory. Would you mind filing a premium support ticket in your BoldGrid Central account so we can take a closer look for you?

Hi Kroy-

You’re absolutely right that Genesis provides one of the best child-theming experiences. I think one of the things you mentioned bears a little clarification, regarding “without having [themes] fail when there are WP updates.”

I think what you’re referring to is the fact that any custom coding modifications you make to your theme are overwritten when the theme gets an update. That’s true. If you’re planning to do a lot of custom PHP development for your website, a child theme approach would likely be the best way to go.

However, BoldGrid’s approach to our theme framework is to give you the most customizable theme without modifying the theme’s code directly.

Technically speaking, BoldGrid’s open-source Theme Framework is very similar to Genesis in that it is meant to build child themes upon.

However, our commercial products, like the Crio SuperTheme and Post and Page Builder are meant to give you full WYSIWYG control over every aspect of your site without any PHP coding. These customizations don’t get overwritten on updates because they’re stored in your database and compiled CSS, not in the theme’s PHP files.

Of course, there are commercial Genesis child themes that offer similar capabilities. We prefer to make sure that our theme is fully compliant with WordPress standards and open-source philosophy, which is why you can find Crio in the WordPress.org Repository, but not Genesis-based themes.

Your second major question about the WordPress Block Editor (also known as Gutenberg), and the future of writing and site-building in WordPress, is a big question.

Right now, we believe that the site-building capabilities of Crio, and the page-building capabilities of the Post and Page Builder are more mature and offer a better user experience than their counterparts in the block editor and block-enabled themes. You can see evidence of this by the huge, and growing, active installation count of the Classic Editor plugin, which the BoldGrid Post and Page Builder is built on-top of.

Site-building, or “Full Site Editing” in WordPress lingo, is still very much in its early phases, with the first “stable” release planned to come out in WordPress 5.8 this summer.

That being said, I think it’s probably true that the block-first approach you mention is the wave of the future, and we do have this in our roadmap. Our primary focus, however, is providing our users with the best experience getting from “square one” to a successful, complete website. And with that goal in mind, we’ll probably hold off on making the transition until the technology matures a little further.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Jesse Owens. Reason: add missing sentence

Hi Ralph-

Awesome, I’m glad to hear that you were able to get it all taken care of!

As I mentioned above, any “attacks, hacking etc” that makes use of these functions must already have access to your account. So the “enemy is already through the gate” in that scenario. As long as you’re following good security best-practices, you’ll be OK with these functions enabled.

You’re right, the setup wizard is a very new feature. We’re doing some digging to find out why the Database cache might have caused the error (it shouldn’t be fatal like that) but in your case I’d recommend leaving it disabled. Cheers, and thanks for the help Eric!

Hi Eric-

Thanks, that’s really good to know! Database caching *shouldn’t* be on by default, I’ll double check with the development team on that.

For the majority of websites and servers, Database caching doesn’t give that much of a performance boost, and sometimes it’s even slower than using MySQL, unless the queries on the site are very complex, so you shouldn’t see much, if any, of a performance loss from that.

Hi Eric-

Thanks for the updates and the details about your plugins.

I tested out W3TC with all of those plugins active and I couldn’t replicate the error. Two of those plugins did jump out as potential troublemakers.

First, Lazy Load Optimizer and W3TC might conflict because they both have the ability to add lazy loading. If you like that plugin, make sure that W3’s lazy loading is turned off in Performance > General Settings > User Experience. I tried it out, though, and I couldn’t get an error from using both.

Second, Admin Bar Edit Content Links jumped out because it hasn’t had an update in over 3 years, so it’s possible that it may have an error after updating to 5.6.2. You mentioned that you deactivated it, and it looks like it has pretty basic functionality, so that might be a “Red Herring” as well.

So all of that being said, I recommend a complete re-installation of W3 Total Cache. Here are the steps:

1. Deactivate and delete W3 Total Cache
2. Make a backup copy of your .htaccess file, and then delete all of W3 Total Cache’s directives. Look for the sections that begin and end with #BEGIN W3TC... and #END W3TC... and delete them all.
3. Delete the W3 Total Cache files and folders:
   • wp-content/cache directory
   • wp-content/w3tc-config directory
   • wp-content/object-cache.php file (if it exists)
   • wp-content/advanced-cache.php file (if it exists)
   • wp-content/dbcache.php flie (if it exists)
   • wp-content/upgrade directory
   • wp-content/plugins/w3-total-cache directory (if it exists)
4. Re-install W3 Total Cache, and make sure that Object Caching and Database Caching are disabled if you’re on a shared hosting platform.

Particularly in your case, since we can’t find any WordPress errors, pay special attention to the .htaccess directives, since they can create 500 errors like this without engaging WordPress’s error handling processes.

Hi Joe-

Yes, I’m checking that site on PageSpeed Insights mobile. It might help you to run the speed test in an Incognito Window, but here’s what I see:

You’re right that it fluctuates a little depending on geographic location and other factors. Another thing to double-check is that you’re using the full address in the “Analyze” bar (click that link to see exactly the same test I’m performing) so that you skip any redirects, for example from http->https or from example.com->www. example .com.

Right now, it looks like you’ve got your menu in the Above Header position, which won’t show up as a hamburger. I think you might have moved that since the last time I checked. To make the hamburger show up, make sure that you’re using the Primary Menu position.

Grid One’s Crio design is already released, but because of the vast differences between the v1 and v2 frameworks, it’s not a straightforward upgrade path (we’re working on a process to improve that). Right now, the best way to get started is to use Cloud WordPress (from the link above) and re-create your pages and posts.

Hi Joe-

Thanks for reaching out! I checked your site on Google PageSpeed Insights, and it looks like you’re pretty comfortably in the Green at a 94 on mobile, which really is quite impressive.

Looking at your Hamburger menu, it seems to be working as expected for me, although I might consider moving the widget with the image of a wicker chair below the menu. Can you describe what you don’t like about the hamburger, or what you’re looking to accomplish?

All of the “BoldGrid Version 1” themes like Grid One are more or less the same as far as speed optimization goes, because they’re all derived from the BoldGrid Theme Framework.

That being said, if you’re looking to upgrade your theme, I’d recommend checking out our latest and greatest, the Crio SuperTheme. It includes much more advanced tools for controlling your hamburger menu as well as other responsive aspects of the site. If you’d like to give it a spin, you can try it out using our free BoldGrid Cloud WordPress staging platform.

Crio is based on the all-new BoldGrid Theme Framework Version 2, and eventually all of the version 1 themes will be replaced with Crio designs, and if you follow the link above to Cloud WordPress you’ll see the Crio version of Grid One as well.

Hi Eric-

It looks like your site is back up again now, hopefully you’ve already solved this on your own!

You can get some more information by enabling the WordPress Debug Log, by adding the line define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true); in your wp-config.php file.

I also noticed that W3 Total Cache has been disabled now. I’m guessing that a cached copy of the error page was being served.

It may be necessary to manually clear out your cache files. Using FTP or Web Hosting Hub’s cPanel File Manager, delete the directory /wp-content/cache and then re-activate W3 Total Cache.

Hi Eric-

Thanks for the updates, I’m glad to hear you were at least able to log in and get your themes updated.

You mentioned that you cleared your browser cache, but do you have any server-side caching that might need to be cleared? Some caching plugins, like our own W3 Total Cache, may not serve cached pages to logged-in users, which would account for the behavior you described.

If you’re using W3 Total Cache, look for the Performance menu in the top admin bar, where you’ll find an option to Purge all caches.

Hi Joe-

Thanks for reaching out! Since WordPress 5.6.2 was released, we do have a bug in the Word Count that our developers are currently investigating, that’s not related to any other plugin conflict.

We expect to have an update out to resolve this shortly, and I’ll update the thread here as soon as we have it released for you.

Hi David-

Thanks for reaching out, we’ll be happy to help out.

I checked out the “Owners” page on your site, and I found the “Non-Owner Pre-Registration Form,” so that’s what I’m assuming you’re referring to. Please correct me if I’m wrong about that.

This form is simply a link to a PDF hosted at documentcloud.adobe.com. Once you’ve created your new PDF form, you can update the link by editing the page, and clicking the Edit (pencil) icon on that link, and paste in the new URL.

Hello Stef-

The app “i-Rule” would be associated with your Google Account, and if you’re no longer able to access it, you’ll need to either restore it, or create it again. Check out this resource from Google’s documentation on how to do that.

Hi Heather-

You’ll want to add the CSS to the Theme Customizer.

The button looks a little different than you described, I want to double-check that we’re talking about the Get In Touch button near the top of your contact page?

Here’s the code that worked for me on that button (the hover text is already black):

a.btn.btn-color-2.btn-large.btn-block:hover {
    text-decoration: underline !important;
    background-color: lightgray;
}

This will use the system default “Light Gray” color, but you can replace that with a different color code if you need to.

Hi Dawn-

Thanks for using W3 Total Cache, I’m sorry to hear that your site speed results are still poor.

Keep in mind that small changes in your testing can also make a huge difference. For example, in this test, I changed the testing location to the US and removed the www. subdomain, and the score is much better: https://gtmetrix.com/reports/boulderreiki.com/5d2PkHb8/

Enabling a CDN would go a long way to reduce the difference in the geographic location, but since your site seems to be locally-focused it may not be worth the investment.

You mentioned that you already compressed your images, but they’re still taking up over half of your total page size at 1.52MB/2.73MB. It seems like you’re using both Jetpack’s and W3 Total Cache’s lazy loading feature, which is causing lazy loading to fail. I’d recommend only using one lazy loading option to make sure that’s working correctly.

Hi Matt-

Thanks for reaching out, and kudos to you for your diligence about making sure your website is fully accessible.

First off, it looks like you’ve found a bug. I’ve submitted a bug report to the theme developers so we can get this fixed moving forward.

There is a workaround that you can use in the meantime. This bug seems to only occur if you use the theme’s built-in cropping tool when you add your logo. If you crop your logo using an image editing program, then re-upload it and click Skip cropping during the upload process, your alt text will be there as expected.

Hi Gloria-

Thanks for reaching out, this is a fairly obscure feature in WordPress but it is possible.

The Read More tag is designed for your archives, like the blog roll, where multiple posts are listed as summaries with the link to go to the full post or page. However, there is also a Next Page tag you can use to paginate your individual posts.

To use it, switch over to the Text Editor tab, and enter in this tag: <!--nextpage-->. That will automatically add a link at that spot to continue on to the next page, and your permalinks will look like example.com/post-name/page/2.

You can also use the plugin Advanced Editor Tools (previously TinyMCE advanced) to add the page break link to your visual editor:

Hi Kristin-

Thanks, that makes perfect sense! You’ve got a somewhat unique use-case in this example, because your “Articles” are all actually part of the same page’s content.

That means that even if you did decide to edit the theme’s files for the social icons, it wouldn’t accomplish what you’re after, because there isn’t any part of your theme file that shows up “in the middle” of your page’s content.

For your case, I’d recommend using the AddToAny shortcode or widget, perhaps right around where you have your “Back to top” links. Click on the (+) Add Block Component button, scroll down to the widgets, and look for the AddToAny Share widget:

Alternatively, you can use the shortcode [addtoany] anywhere in your page’s content as well.