Jonathon Leathers

If I were doing this I would use Advanced Custom Fields but that would depend on how advanced your knowledge is with WordPress and making changes to theme templates.

You could create a page for each shelter/rescue and using ACF you can create a Repeater field with sub-fields for images and descriptions. Then they can add as many animals as they want to their page.

Again, this may be a bit advanced if you have no experience with these sort of things.

You can use Javascript to do that. The code below will automatically redirect after 10 seconds. You’ll have to adjust it further to do what you want.

setTimeout(function () {
   window.location.href = "https://www.google.com/"; // change this URL
}, 10000); //10000 = 10 seconds

I would recommend not doing this at all though and simply creating your redirects with the .htaccess file or in PHP so the user simply goes directly to the new site and so search engines know about the change.

I suspect what you want is to use the pre_get_posts hook. You can read about it here. This will allow you to define which categories to include or exclude from your homepage.

The MDN article is a pretty straightforward explanation.

Basically anything in an article is “intended to be independently distributable or reusable”.

The first and easiest thing to try is to go into Settings -> Permalinks and click “Save Changes”.

Thanks for pointing out the obvious and then admitting that it’s not even a real solution. Have anything useful to contribute yet?

I don’t have any control over my clients hosting plan/server. I can’t control what MySQL version is on my clients production server.

You could copy/paste that and it would apply to so many of the responses people make in the threads about this subject it’s not even funny.

Thanks for looking into this. I’ll follow the issue you opened with WooCommerce on Github.

James, thanks for the responses. I was able to get it working and posted how in this thread in case it works for others too.

Unfortunately I don’t always have control over the client’s hosting provider but when I do I will start considering MySQL 5.5.3 or above a prerequisite to be considered an appropriate WordPress hosting provider.

So, I was able to get this to work by doing the following in PHPMyAdmin:

1) Click the “Export” tab for the database
2) Click the “Custom” radio button
3) Go the section titled “Format-specific options” and change the dropdown for “Database system or older MySQL server to maximize output compatibility with:” from NONE to MYSQL40.
4) Scroll to the bottom and click “GO”.

This worked for me and I was able to import that database to a server running MySQL 5.1. This thread about a plugin gave me the idea to use that setting, I actually don’t know what MYSQL40 even means.

Based on what Otto said, I guess this wouldn’t work if your database has 4 byte characters saved in it but hopefully this helps you mctenold and maybe a few others.

Here are some more threads about this in case you want to follow them on the off chance someone actually comes up with a solution for those of us in this situation:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/sql-error-when-importing-database-1?replies=3

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/unknown-collation-utf8mb4_unicode_ci?replies=11

The utf8mb4 Upgrade

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29909290/collation-issue-is-it-possible-to-downgrade-convert-from-utf8mb4-unicode-ci-to

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29916610/1273-unknown-collation-utf8mb4-unicode-ci-cpanel

Older versions of MySQL don’t support utf8mb4 properly.

Which is why we were asking if anyone knows how to export or alter the database to go from utf8mb4 back to utf8.

If you’re going to be importing into an older version of MySQL, then you need to develop on that same older version of MySQL. Downgrade your local dev version if you need to do this sort of thing.

That’s good to know going forward but doesn’t help with our current situation unfortunately.

Unfortunately the hosting provider will not upgrade MySQL and basically said “Google it”.

I think it’s pretty common practice to install WordPress locally when you begin working on a new site, and then move everything to a dev or production server once the time comes.

Haha, I think we all know that “pretty common” is an understatement.

There has to be a way I can convert or export the database to be compatible with versions pre < 5.5.3.

Hopefully someone who knows about such things will see this thread and help us out!

Use a local dev version that matches your actual live version.

Is there a way to do that when you are working on multiple client projects who all have different hosts and therefore different versions of PHP / MySQL?

Also, that does not solve the current dilemma of what do about a database that has already been automatically updated and needs to be rolled back to how it was pre-4.2.