donshapiro

This is NOT a feature add like something nice. This is a BUG, a GLITCH, an error in how the code is written in Customizr. I have six WordPress sites running 5 different themes. None of the other four themes have this problem. Further, whenever I state a problem in a forum like this on the other themes, I get answers from the developer including the corrected code. I don’t want to change the behavior of the menu. The drop down is appropriate. But there is absolutely no reason why with that drop down that the main navigation bar item Press Kit does not take one to the Press Kit page.

Yes, I’m aware of those plugins. This is not about me. This is about WordPress. How many WordPress users even use plugins? How many of them would even think they need to change their user name? We have to start thinking like the average Joe and Mary WordPress user and what they are going to need to protect themselves.

Plugins work around and often outside of the WP database which is quite secured inside the host. Hackers can detect the plugins through the source code and get around some of them. We need rock solid user name protection from within the codex itself, not from plugins. Don’t get me wrong. I love plugins and use a lot of them. This is core.

Even though most WP users would scream bloody murder, maybe we need to force this change at the codex level by requiring 14 string passwords with certain parameters even to install WordPress and then do the same with the user name. If this was required at the beginning just to use WordPress, everyone would be secure. Of course, there would need to be good explanations as to why this requirement is being imposed on everyone.

Oh yeah, that’s number 3 – username different than publicly used name. The big three.

Hackers succeed because they run strings through computers to find matches. The most difficult the strings the longer it would take to crack which defeats their need to do things quickly. They can’t afford to have their system tied up for several days just trying to hack one password. Now, if they had to run two different difficult strings and get an exact match on both to get in, it would probably require an IBM super computer running for at least a day or two which in the hacker world would be months to try to crack one account.

Maybe a better metaphor for hackers is The Borg!

It’s a little scary out there. I don’t know what formal research has been done about what WordPress users do and don’t do but I can only imagine based on talking to many of them. Most people on the internet including the average WP blogger just don’t have a clue about security. Those that do know its important may put a couple of numbers and capitalized letter in their password and that’s about it. Between those who use easily hacked passwords and those who use just a little bit more, we are probably talking about 90% of all users.

Yes, copy and paste is critical to thwart the key stroke trackers. Never, ever type a password into anything. Period. Even if you have the world’s best malware protection, Wiley Coyote could develop a new way to slip in a tracker before the security people close the loop.

I believe I’m estimating low when I say that 90% of computer and internet users are not properly protecting themselves. It’s probably closer to 97%. We are fighting human nature here. People want to use things they can remember for both their user name and their password.

www.ads-software.com and WordPress.com along with the entire development community needs to embrace a major educational campaign for all users about proper security. The most basic rules I can imagine that everyone should be using are these 2:

1. copy and paste passwords
2. A password should have at least 14 characters with 10 of those being at least 2 different special characters and the other 4 a combination of letters and numbers with one of the letters being capitalized. Longer strings of special characters are even better.

Let’s work together to make all WordPress websites safe and secure.

Nobita,

Thank you for considering my suggestions. Yes, creating a new blog excerpt template sounds like the best approach.

Thank You,

Don

Donncha,

You’ve asked a very good question. There is a critical reason all websites should be in a load balanced environment…port access to their website. Under a legacy system, all traffic to a website must go through one port. If that port gets busy either because the website (hopefully) is growing or because the website is on a shared server, then higher traffic levels will cause the sites to slow down. Sometimes, those slowdowns can be dramatic.

Even those who have paid more for a dedicated IP and hosting package are housed in a server with hundreds and maybe thousands of other websites. Even if someone has the money to run on their own server which very few WordPress websites do, they are still subject to speed issues through a single port.

Load balancing of packets and traffic is the best way to insure that a website of any size and volume doesn’t experience slow downs due to port traffic.

Why is this so super important? Because site speed is one of the key factors Google uses in page rank. They want to rank pages higher that are a better experience to the user. You know this which is why you created WP Super Cache. But caching can’t help speed of delivering websites if the port is clogged up.

When I called Godaddy and told them we were experiencing speed issues, they immediately asked us to migrate to the new servers. There was no cost. They are additionally encouraging us to consider migrating to CP Panel which they just started offering instead of their own hosted control center. They said that would increase our speed too.

Back in 2004 when I worked with a super server techie (who had designed American Express’s server center amongst other things), he said load balancing is the wave of the future. It has now arrived in the hosting environment and will become more popular both because the hosting companies want to move people to these grid environments and because website owners want to keep their speed high and avoid bottle necks.

I would be surprised if there are any non load balanced server environments for the medium and large hosting companies within 10 years, most likely sooner. No one is going to build a new server environment today that is not load balanced. It is only the old systems that are that way. As those are replaced like Godaddy is doing, they are being replaced with grid servers. As the majors move, so the minors will follow.

For the hosting company, this also gives them advantages in how they administer their network and the level of availability they can consistently deliver. One huge advantage for a hosting company is that a server can go down without it affecting website availability. That keeps their customers happy and attracts more business. In a legacy environment, if the server has a problem, those sites go down until its repaired. They have to use mirror systems for availability to reduce the down time but that is more expensive to operate than a load balanced environment.

Hope this helps,

Don

This is what I expected to learn and it raises a major question.

Godaddy is the world’s largest hosting company. They are now calling their single port server environment legacy. They are migrating everyone over to their new grid load balanced system. Any new customers joining GoDaddy will automatically be put into the load balanced system. If Godaddy is doing this, then this is the direction everyone will be moving to.

So if single port servers are legacy, that means WP Super Cache is now officially a legacy plugin.

Are the developers of WP Super Cache going to write the code so their program works in the new normal load balanced environment? Yes, the code can be written to cache with matching time stamps in this environment. Someone just has to be willing to write and test that code. This isn’t really new. It’s just new to the hosting companies. A company I worked for installed a fully load balanced system in 2004 for its server environment.

What other caching plugins are currently written to work in a load balanced environment?

As Bob Dylan sang in 1963, “The times they are a changin.”

Hi Nobita,

Let me try to be as clear as I can.

In another WordPress Theme “Responsive” by CyberChimps, they have a template in Pages that is called Blog Excerpt (Summary). If I select this template, the Page will show excerpt summaries of the number of blogs specified in WP settings. This is not about categories or tags. I do not want these excerpts to show on an existing blog post. This is a completely separate Page that is added just to show blog excerpts. Here is how this works on one of my Responsive Themes so you can see it in action (this site only has 3 blogs so that’s all that show):

https://donshapiro.com/blog/

For my Raindrops website, I want to create a new page and tell that page that I want it to show blog excerpts only just like I did in my other website. The excerpts are pulled from the same data as is used for the home page by date with the latest first. I also want it to show more post than the WP settings which are set to 6 because that’s what I want on the homepage. For this page I would like to show 15.

This is not about categories or tags. I don’t just want to show the blogs from one category or tag which can be done now by selecting that category or tag. I want to show the post from all categories by date with the most recent first. Here is a preview of the blank page where I want these excerpts to show:

https://pleiadians.net/?page_id=224&preview=true

I cannot paste any code because I can’t write code and wouldn’t even know where to look to find it. From my experience in reviewing WordPress Themes, it appears that a Blog Excerpt (Summary) template that can be assigned to a page is a very common item.

Additionally, I cannot use Categories in the menus to do this because your Categories do not show excerpts, they show the entire post. Categories are supposed to show only excerpts of all the post in that category.

If this is too difficult to create, I will understand. I just thought it would be nice to have such a page.

Thanks,

Don

Hi Nobita,

Thank you for this code. I’m not sure this code will do what I’m talking about so I want to clarify my request.

I do NOT want to change the existing home page at all nor the default template. I need both these to operate exactly as they do now. I do not want blog excerpts to show on pages with the default template.

I need to create a new page that operates differently than the default template and all the other listed templates. I only want the blog excerpts to show on this page, not my other blog post nor my other pages. So this excerpt list on a page is not for every page, just pages where I want it.

If I put this code in, how will I tell a page that I want it to use this code instead of the default template format?

Thank you,

Don

Hello Nobita,

Thank you for working on this. The new code did not remove the extra dark band that is not apart of the image header jpg. Yes, I can see that there must be javascript issues. For now, I changed the website from Fluid to 950px wide which solves the problem. Of course, I would rather have the Fluid size but until the javascript issue has been resolved, it would be better for us to stay with something that delivers the image we want.

I hope you will find success at dealing with these header issues using the Fluid width.

Thank you so much for all your effort and time. Your support is very much appreciated.

Don

Hello Nobita,

Thank you for these clear and simple instructions. I understand them and have implemented them. They have resulted in an improvement but were not completely successful.

The amount of space above the Pleiadians_header.jpg image was cut in half through this procedure. There is a still a dark space between the top of the image and the top of the page that the software (not sure if that is WordPress or the Theme) still counts as part of the header image height. This is preventing the full image file from showing.

Here is what is interesting. In WordPress / header / it shows a preview of the image that has been uploaded. In the preview, the entire image shows plus a dark band above the image. So this dark band that is reducing what is seen on the website is also showing in the preview. Something is adding a space above the image file itself.

You can go to the website now and see the remaining dark area that is preventing the entire 198 pixel jpg file from showing. Would you know of a way to eliminate the final dark band so the entire jpg shows.

In the full jpg image, there is a tagline below Pleiadians that says We Are Here to Help Raise Your Frequency.

Very much appreciate your time and support.

Don

Hi Nobita,

Thank you so much for making this a bit easier on me. I really appreciate your help with this. It works perfectly.

I like your Theme a lot. I’ve tried many themes during the last few months trying to find one that could work for an usual website upgrade from a site created in 2000. Everything your Theme does was exactly what we needed. Now I can proceed to put the actual copy in and create the header image.

Don’t expect to run across much else technically. I will read through all the forum post to see if there is anything covered I need to address.

Thank you for doing something beyond what most developers do and creating a Theme that offers so much color and wire frame flexibility plus it appears to handle plugin widgets that some other Themes can’t.

Don

I found one area in the functions.php file that references the excerpt. But even though I can’t read code, it appears to say except is true already. This shows how little I understand about all this. All i wanted was to be able to change core, standard, basic WP Setting for Reading to Summary. Why can’t it be that easy? Here it is the code I found.

if ( ! function_exists( ‘raindrops_entry_content’ ) ) {

function raindrops_entry_content( $more_link_text = null, $stripteaser = false ) {

global $post;

$raindrops_excerpt_condition = raindrops_detect_excerpt_condition();

//var_dump( $raindrops_excerpt_condition );
//echo ‘hello’;

// if ( RAINDROPS_USE_LIST_EXCERPT == true and ! is_single( ) and ! is_page( ) ) {
if ( $raindrops_excerpt_condition == true ) {
/* remove shortcodes */
$excerpt = preg_replace(‘!\[[^\]]+\]!’, ”, get_the_excerpt( ) );

$excerpt = apply_filters( ‘the_excerpt’, $excerpt );

echo apply_filters( ‘raindrops_entry_content’, $excerpt );
} else {

Hi Nobita,

I appreciate your taking the time to share this information. I really don’t like going into the code to do things but I will do this even though I know zero about code. But I will need your help at a very basic level. I do not understand anything of a technical nature that you wrote.

1. Where in this very long themefunctions.php file is the place where this code exist that I need to change? (there is no functions.php file). After 5 minutes of trying to scroll through and look at the function list, I could not find it. Maybe someone who knows code can find this stuff quickly. That is not me. Please tell what percentage of the page from the top of the file I should scroll down to find the area where I modify this code. What is before and after it?

2. By index.php, do you mean the file Main Theme Index.php? There is no file just named index.php. Once again, how far down do I scroll to find the area that needs to be changed.

I sure hope I can make these type of changes without messing up the code.

3. When you do an update, will you make corrections to your code so that the WP Settings for Reading actually work? Or will I have to redo this code again. I don’t want to mess with child themes. Once again, that involves more technical stuff that I don’t want to bother with. Is there any goal within the WP development community toward writing Themes and code so that us users never, ever have to touch the code?

Thanks for your time and effort.

Don

Hi,

I identified the problem. You were right that it works on our other websites when we switched them over for a test. So I suspected it might be one of the plugins we have installed at https://www.lifeisaforkintheroad.com which we don’t have on our other sites.

Turns out the culprit is WP-Copyright Protect which prevents people from copying our blogs. When I turned this off, the Customize function worked fine with the preview coming up and the menu working as it should. When this plugin is activated, the Customize function will not bring up a preview of the website and keeps going through a loop.

This was also true for other Themes we temporarily activated. I will send a message to that plugin telling them about this issue. It’s a critical plugin for us because we had someone steal our content and post it as their own on their blog.

Thanks for getting me to look at this a bit more.

Don