Indexing of Proxy Posts

This is because you need to tell WordPress to build the new permalinks to the proxy posts. You do this by saving the WordPress “Permalinks” settings. You don’t have to change anything, just open the Settings/Permalinks page and hit save. This is found in the admin menu under the Settings item.

Thanks for the reply. I have done this, but the records continue to display a 404 unless the page with the shortcode on is present.

If your links end with something like “?pdb=123” then you need to check the “Use Proxy Posts for Single Record Displays” setting. This will change the single record links to point to the proxy post pages instead of the single record page with the shortcode.

I have already taken that step. I have carefully read through the instructions and carried out each step as described but I just can’t get this to work. In fact even the hyperlinks from the main record page at have stopped working?

• This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by James Huff. Reason: redundant link removed

OK, we’ll just walk through the settings that make this work. You’ve probably already done all this, but since it’s not working, we need to go back to basics.

First thing to check is the single record links that are presented in the [pdb_list] display. These links are placed on the field defined in the “Single Record Link Field” setting, and the list must be configured to display this field.

What kind of field are you using for your single record link field, and are they clickable in the list display?

Next we need to look at the configuration of the proxy post permalinks. You need several things to be configured correctly for this to work. First, you need a slug for the record, this is generated by the settings in the “Post Slug Source Fields” These should be set to fields that will have data for every record.

You must have a valid string for the “URL Slug” setting, and you should choose this carefully, you don’t want to change it later if you care about search engines indexing your proxy posts.

You also have to configure the proxy post content.

Once that is set, you need to generate the proxy posts. This is done using the button under “Create or Update Proxy Posts for All Records” under the Advanced Proxy Posts tab. If you have a lot of records, this will take several minutes. When you refresh the page, you can tell if it is complete by the status message that is displayed. Before it is complete. there will be no change. Check this message to make sure the proxy post building worked.

Did you get the status message telling you the proxy posts were built?

Once that’s done, you need to refresh the WordPress permalinks as explained before.

Now open the page with the [pdb_list] shortcode and look at the single record links. Each one should point to a unique URL as determined by the proxy post permalinks configuration. What do those URLs look like?

So, if things are not working after you’ve done all this, you need to look at what you have in your WordPress configuration that might interfere with it. Anything that modifies permalinks (theme or plugin) will be a potential problem.

I’m completely at a loss with this. All the proxy posts are there, the links on the list are clickable e.g. https://www.ukds.uk/driving-test-centre/poole/ but each link leads to a 404

So, the single record link is correct, but the url doesn’t resolve to a valid page. This means that the WordPress permalinks are not getting set. The partial URL “https://www.ukds.uk/driving-test-centre/” is working as it should to show all the proxy posts, so that’s a good sign.

Are you using any kind of caching on your site? Best to disable that until things are working.

You should try re-building the permalinks again by going to the Settings/Permalinks page. You should probably be using the “Post Name” option for the permalinks. Save the Permalinks settings. That should get everything working.

I finally got this working! I set it up on a new site without any problems, then realised on my original site that I had your permalinks extension also installed. I disabled this and everything suddenly worked!

I do have another question however. In the proxy posts, details of most of the record fields appear, but not the link fields. I have a field which includes a link to a location in Google maps. Is it not possible to include this type of field?

You cannot use link fields in the “Post Content Source Fields” setting which determines the content of the proxy posts because these fields are for the purpose of adding searchable content to the proxy post.

You can, however, display link fields if you are using the Display Using PDB Shortcode setting and have the shortcode configured to show the link field.