Jesse Owens

Hi Jessica-

From what you’ve described here:

In some places, my phone number…is black.
Some browsers are still only showing my old site

It sounds like you may be dealing with an issue of caching. I didn’t see any caching plugins or CDN active on your site, so you may need to clear your browser’s cache to make sure you’re seeing your new site. I wasn’t able to see the black phone number in any of my tests.

One thing I do see that’s off about your contact page, and it’s partially my fault, is the First and Last name fields overextending beyond their column. That’s because I had previously advised you to Use Theme CSS for your form. Try adding this line of custom CSS:

ul.wpuf-form .wpuf-fields input[type=text] {
	width: 95%;
}

I found that resolves a lot of the issues with mobile formatting as well. If that doesn’t resolve all of the issues you mentioned, see if you can take a screenshot and let us know which browsers or pages you’re seeing the broken formatting on, and I’ll take a closer look. You can use a service like imgbb.com to share screenshots here.

Hi Anjampie-

This is a pretty common question, especially for people who might have used WordPress.com-hosted sites in the past. That’s because this feature is built-in to sites hosted there, but not by default into self-hosted WordPress sites that don’t have the extra features Automattic adds to those websites.

I’d recommend checking out the Subscriptions module of the Jetpack plugin. You can use the free version of Jetpack for this feature. It adds an area where your visitors can subscribe to new posts as well as to new comments on posts.

Hi Victor-

Generally speaking, this type of “flicker” is known as Layout Shift, or the amount your page changes as the various CSS and JavaScript resources are downloaded. Because Custom CSS is added to the very bottom of your pages, it can be one of the last things to load, and might affect the layout shift on slower connections.

That said, I checked out your site and ran through a couple of pageloads on a slower 3G connection, and I’m not seeing a lot of layout shift. You can check Google PageSpeed Insights, it looks like your layout shift is pretty decent- 0.022 in my test.

Keep in mind that you’re running WP Super Cache, which disables the caching for logged-in users by default, so if you’re checking out your site while logged in, it might be slower for you than for your visitors. I recommend checking your site in an private browsing or “incognito” window so that you can see what it’s like for your visitors who aren’t logged in.

Glad to hear it Sijay! Let us know if you have any more questions, we’re happy to help.

Hi Roy-

The Never cache the following pages field supports regular expressions, so you could accomplish this with a line like this:
.+/pagetoexclude

Hi Sijay-

Thanks for reaching out, this looks like a bug in the collapsible menu’s CSS. The [+] signs that expand and collapse the sub-menus are offsetting the text by 32 pixels, so we’ll need to use half that value’s padding to make them correctly centered.

I’ve submitted a bug report to our developers about this, but in the meantime you can fix your menu with this Custom CSS code. Navigate to Customize > Advanced > Custom JS & CSS and paste this into your Custom Theme CSS:

.navbar-nav.sm-collapsible a.has-submenu { padding-right: 16px; }

Hi Timothy-

Thanks for reaching out, I’m very sorry to hear about the critical error. Were you able to get the error message so we can look into this for you?

There are a couple of places to look. First, WordPress will send an email to the administrator account of the website with the text of the error message. Be sure to check your SPAM folder as well.

If you can’t find that email, you can also check your server’s error logs for the message. Your hosting company may be able to assist finding that message.

Finally, as a Pro user, don’t forget about your premium support option in the Performance > Support menu of your site, our techs will be able to take a closer look and help you get up and running.

You can use your Crio license on unlimited sites within the same business. For example, you may use it on a Development, Staging, and Production site. Keep in mind that your Key can be used to purchase BoldGrid Connect Search images, so you should not share your key with sites that you are delivering to a client or another business.

Hi Gary-

Your dev site’s front-end should be visible without a login. For example, I can see your homepage, “our identity,” “our work” and “contact us” pages. Is it possible that the link you were providing was for a page that hasn’t been published yet? Saved as a draft or private post?

Another way you can get around this is to create user accounts for your reviewers. Navigate to the Users > Add New menu to set them up.

Hi Philip-

From what you’ve described, it sounds like when you do your backup restoration, it’s also restoring the .htaccess file from your old host, which might have used a different PHP handler than your new host.

If you can’t find the Addhandler line to delete from your restored .htaccess, another thing you can do is to try using the WordPress Default .htaccess rules.

First, make sure to make a copy of the .htaccess you’re using now, you can name it something like .htaccess.bak, and then make a new .htaccess file using just the default code:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

Here are DreamHost’s instructions for editing the .htaccess file. If you’re still stuck, I highly recommend contacting DreamHost Support so they can help you out directly.

Hi Angelina-

Thanks for the question, I agree that’s very strange. I double-checked a Westview installation on my end, and the drop-down submenus are working as expected:

Would you be willing to share a link to your site so we can take a look for you? If you don’t want it to be public, add it to the “Website” field when you reply and we won’t publish it.

Hi Robin-

Yes, this log does look like it confirms that file permissions issue. You can use your backup archive to only restore those two directories, but it will take a little more work. Here’s how I’d do it:

1. Download the backup archive to your local computer
2. Unzip the archive and locate the directories for /wp-content/themes/sunny and /wp-content/plugins/search-ajax (I’m guessing the name of the theme and plugin folders, but you should recognize them)
3. Use FTP or your host’s file manager tool to replace those directories on your website.

I’ve also created a feature request for our developers to review to restore specific directories, I think your example shows that would be a really useful feature for a lot of folks.

Hi Robin-

This error is related to the file permissions on your server. One possible explanation I can think of is that your System Administrator disabled write permissions on the root of your website, and only allows your user to write to the wp-content directory rather than the core WordPress files.

One thing that might help us to see is your restoration log. Navigate to Total Upkeep > Tools > Logs and locate the log file called restore-XXXXXXX.log with a timestamp that corresponds to the failed restoration, and copy and paste any errors in that log here so we can dig deeper for you.

Hi Nils-

Yes, by all means definitely get in touch with our Pro Support Team since you have purchased. That’s definitely odd that you’re not able to load the Support area of the plugin, so you can use this contact form instead.

Hi Emily-

I’m seeing a couple of things you’ll probably want to do to improve the mobile resposiveness.

First, it looks like you’re on a pretty old version of the Diced Theme, 1.22.1, which was released in Nov. 2017. We’ve made a lot of improvements to the theme in the last three years, so I’d highly recommend making a backup of your website and then updating your theme, plugins, and WordPress Core.

Next, I’m seeing some of your pages with strange negative margins, like the Post Frame Buildings page. These would have had to be manually configured to be that way in the Advanced Controls section of your builder:

For pages like this one, I’d recommend re-writing them using the pre-designed blocks available from the Add Block interface, so that you don’t have to worry about making custom margins and designs.

Hi Emily-

Awesome, thanks for the detailed idea of what you’re looking for! I’ll try to answer each one in turn. A lot of these are going to be handled with Custom CSS. Navigate to Customize > Advanced > Custom JS & CSS to add any of the custom rules I’m about to list.

i’d like that green transparent background to be the grey colour in my theme’s colour palette (i think it’s number 4), including the widget area. (but i still want the flower to be the background image showing just at the top of the page)

Try this CSS Rule:

.blog.palette-primary .site-content, .single-post.palette-primary .site-content 
   { background-color: #2f383d; }

i’d like to be able to display the posts in a list with excerpts rather than an endless scrolling through every post.

Two things are required to show excerpts rather than the full post.

First, you’ll need to change a setting in Settings > Blog (or Settings > Reading if you don’t have BoldGrid Inspirations active) and make sure that the option for For each post in a feed, include Summary instead of Full Text.

Then, in your actual post, make sure to include a Read More tag after your first paragraph to show WordPress where the summary should stop. It looks like this:

– feature image or thumbnail on the left
– title, author, date, and short description on the right
– categories displayed somewhere (i like the prominent way creative market does it – is something like that at all possible?)
– possibly with a light border around each post
– choosing between list and grid is definitely a cool feature, but not really sure what is possible here

A lot of the things you’re trying to do can be done more easily by using the Post List component in a separate page. Check out this short video I made for another user that has a quick overview of how to use it:

I also helped another user using a Post List block component move their featured images to the left-hand side like you described here, check out those instructions here.

Switching between the list and grid view would take a pretty significant amount of customizations, probably requiring some work in PHP and JavaScript. That might be more trouble than it’s worth.

i’d like visitors to be able to choose a category at the top and have just the posts filed in that category shuffle around on this same page rather than have a whole new category page load – that or have the ability to edit how the category pages look too, but the load time is definitely a turn off if people want to check out what there is in the different categories at a glance

I can see what you mean about the loading time. You might want to consider a caching plugin to help speed that up. Another good option is the Search and Filter Plugin, which adds a new widget to accomplish that in your sidebar.

Yet another possibility using the Post List block would be to add “sections” for different categories to your page, since those Post Lists will let you sort by category.

on the actual post pages:
– grey background
– remove date from above picture
– add a more prominently styled author, date, and categories below the title (more like an article i guess) again, similar to creative market
– remove the HTML options from the commenting area (I don’t think it’s relevant to my audience at all, and kinda clogs things up)

Gray background: the code I provided in the first question will do this for you.
Remove the HTML options: Use the custom CSS found in this article.

Your two questions about the Post Metadata are a little tougher. It’s easy enough to hide the date:

span.posted-on { display: none; }
span.byline { text-transform: capitalize !important;
/* Also add custom styling here */}

But adding the categories to this section isn’t quite so straightforward. I’ll do a little more research to see if I can find a plugin that will meet this need for you.

If moving to crio is the best bet, can i do so without losing all that i’ve made so far or would it mean abandoning the florentine theme and starting over?

You’d keep all of your content, but some customizations would be lost, so this might not be the ideal solution for you at this stage. Feel free to try out Crio in Cloud WordPress to see if you like it without affecting your site.

Hi Clay-

The colors of the “wedges” are generated by the color palette you find in Customize > Colors. There are three background colors that are created, background-primary, background-secondary, and background-tertiary, and they’ll work as expected if the blocks on the page go in that order.

All of that being said, Wedge doesn’t play very nicely when you’re using custom background colors for your blocks.

Taking a look at your site, since all of the blocks are a white background, you could use this Custom CSS rule in your Customize > Advanced > Custom JS & CSS:

.entry-content .bgtfw .container-fluid::before, .entry-content .bgtfw .container-fluid::after {
    background-color: #fff;
}

On the other hand, you can also remove the wedges altogether using this rule:

.entry-content .bgtfw .container-fluid::before,
.entry-content .bgtfw .container-fluid::after {
	display: none;
}

Hi Kevin-

I’m glad to hear it! DreamObjects by DreamHost is a really user-friendly way to get your offsite backup storage reliably working, and it’s good to hear that you chose to go with that. Please let us know if you have any more questions, we’re happy to help!

Hi Lara-

We’ve seen this error being reported frequently with other plugins since the release of WordPress 5.5.

The only one of BoldGrid’s plugins that still has this issue is BoldGrid Staging, which we no longer recommend using if you have it. We now recommend using a separate staging site on BoldGrid Cloud WordPress.

If you do have BoldGrid Staging active on your site, go ahead and deactivate that plugin. If you don’t, try disabling each one of your plugins one-by-one until that error goes away. There’s a good chance that this might be the underlying cause of your post-saving issue.

Hi Keisha-

I’m sorry to hear that you weren’t able to get your migration to work. We’ll be happy to assist if you have any questions on getting that to work.

In order to request a refund, you should contact our billing support team in your BoldGrid Central account, and be sure to mention the last 4 digits of the card that was used to make the purchase so we can process the refund for you.