Timeline is broken and not showing corretly

The timeline was updated last night – and now lays out the timeline differently. We have also re-written the entire plugin due to the number of issues our users were facing.

I am not sure what “completley broken” means, so if you could please outline what exactly is wrong – and share a link to your site.

Thank you,
Evan

Hi thanks for the quick reply. Images disappeared, text is cut off and timeline is running into each other. Here is a link to the page. I have 33 timeline announcements with text and images in each… as you can see the images are gone and the text has been cut off including the headings, and they are also they running into each other…. https://jamesepepper.com/history_maintenance/

Thanks!

I would recommend taking a look at the following support thread that was posted shortly before yours – where I explain what happened, and why:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/timeline-display-changed-on-most-recent-posts?replies=7

Thank you,
Evan

Thanks for your help. I’m not entirely sure how to fix the problem. I have a lot of information in each announcement. I saw your tutorial in customizing it, but I guess it doesn’t apply to my case as I use images in the body with links along with other html code like headings, etc. I cannot use the feature image due to the lack of linking and positioning of the image. I have no problem in purchasing your plugin if it will put back all my information exactly how I set up before. I spent many hours adding the info and customizing it, I can’t afford to spend more hours customizing all over again. Please help!

Hi Loiruca,

You can easily get things back to how they were using the new templating engine.

If you copy over the file ‘timeline-express-container.php’ to your theme root in a ‘timeline-express’ directory (eg: wp-content/themes/your_theme/timeline-express/), you can fully customize the announcement container. Customizing it would allow you to replace the_excerpt() with the_content(), or even better – writing your own excerpt() function to allow for HTML to be used in the announcement excerpts.

In the previous releases we had a custom function that enabled HTML in excerpts, but many times the announcement containers ended up nesting inside one another for some users due to the HTML being used.

You don’t need to purchase the pro version to make use of the templating engine, which allows you to take the base plugin and fully customize it to your needs – which could include wrapping the title in an anchor tag, wrapping images in any anchor tags etc. The sky is the limit.

On that note – we had to remove the custom function that allowed HTML in excerpts, as it was causing more issues than anything. There is a reason that WordPress prevents HTML in excerpts by default , and we wanted to follow along with WordPress core code standards.

Another, better, option would be to add a custom metabox on the announcement page titled ‘Custom Excerpt’ – which allows you to enter custom HTML into it.

Once added to your announcements, you could then customize the announcement container and use the new meta data in place of the old excerpt function.

Give me a little while, and when I go on lunch I can write out a documentation article on how to enable custom excerpts – with or without HTML markup in it.

I will post that back here when I get it written.

Thanks,
Evan

Hi Loiruca,

Here is an article explaining how you can generate a custom field titled ‘Custom Excerpt’ – where you can use HTML or any other markup of your choosing.

Once generated, you can use the built in filter to replace the default announcements with the content of your new ‘Custom Excerpt’ field.

The following article will help explain it, and walk you through the process of what needs to be done to achieve HTML in excerpts:

https://www.wp-timelineexpress.com/documentation/enable-html-excerpts/

Thanks,
Evan

Edit: It’s also worth noting that during the writing of that article I noticed one small bug, and had to push out a minor patch to resolve the issue and make it possible for HTML to be used in the excerpts. So you should update to 1.2.1 (or later) if you would like to attempt the article above.

Thanks!
Evan

Hi Evan, thanks so much for your help! I followed the steps above and copied my content to the new Custom Excerpt and it works perfectly! Thanks!!!

Awesome! So glad to hear that it wasn’t anything too difficult to follow, and very glad to hear that you were able to get things back up and running!

If you continue to use the plugin and find things useful, I’d love it if you could leave us a positive review here in the repository. The most current reviews reflect some of the older versions – so users may get the wrong idea of the current state.

https://www.ads-software.com/support/view/plugin-reviews/timeline-express

Thanks again and have a great rest of your day!

Evan