Answer to a question on here causes website to crash

You should always make backups of your files before you change them.

It’s possible that your host has a backup that they can easily restore.

If this is the first time you have modified your theme you can back it up, then switch themes and then delete the theme you were using and upload a fresh copy of it, then switch back to it.

Um… Duh!

Can we now take a look at the trees inside the forest?

The point: There is a response on this “self-help” site that causes websites to now crash and crash hard.

I already fixed what was wrong by going into my site’s file manager through my host. I just don’t think other people should be counting on that particular response to fix things within their site.

Well excuse me for trying to help. You said your site would “be down for several hours” and there is no reason for that to happen.

Actually, if you go back and read your response, what you gave was along the lines of:

Now that you’ve totally screwed up your site, this is what you SHOULD have done.

Turns out the fix was simple. But the next person who tries to use that code might not be that lucky.

As Tom Petty once said “You can believe what you want to believe, but you don’t have to live like a refugee.” You also don’t have to be rude to someone who is trying to help you.

You’re rudeness at being caught giving a non-answer answer for the sake of gaining favor with the WP gurus is FAR more unforgivable than my calling you on it in the first place.

I’m closing down this thread. I put my warning out there and your ego is getting in the way of my attempt to actually help another person not go through what I went through.

Wow. Just wow… If that’s not flat out unmerited abuse, I don’t know what is.

@pipdigitalcom

Since this is the only link in the referenced thread that involved any file creation or code manipulation of any type;

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/how-to-create-rss-feed-that-includes-multiple-categories#post-1645347

It must be the solution you attempted that “crashed my magazine’s website and I’ll be down for several hours thanks to this”.

I just followed the referenced instructions on a test installation of WordPress 3.4 Beta 4 using the twentyeleven theme. The only reference I changed was the category ID’s. It worked exactly as stated. Then just for giggles, I applied four different custom permalink structures to the test site, and re-tested the custom feed with each one of them. Again, each time it worked as stated.

I suspect you probably made an error when you added the code to your themes functions.php file, which in turn, rendered your theme useless. I only say that, because all of the other steps are so… simple.

Don’t know what else to say, other than I used the same info you did, and failed to experience the same level of failure as you.

I might be willing to try the same thing on a version of 3.3.2, if you like, just to be “experimentally precise”. But I don’t think it will make any difference.