psicop

The procedure to create “child templates” is unnecessarily complicated (and I say that as someone who’s set up more than a few Linux servers). It’s just not worth all that work. But thanks for the function reference!

Also the “show current template” plugin helped a great deal.

Solved. But I’m still mystified as to what happened and why.

I was able, just now, to get it working. After having to go to a couple support pages, including one buzztone cited (thank you). But too many mysteries about this remain, including why, all of a sudden, an update to the plugin broke it.

Among those mysteries are these 2:

1. According to the documentation I read, the default form was never right, to begin with, and should not have ever worked. But … it did (as I said, as recently as 10 days ago, for me anyway). If CF7 should never have been functional, with defaults, at all, then why was it working until it was updated?

2. This validator was able to find the errors, and could even count them up. But, it wouldn’t disclose their nature or where they were. It makes little sense that someone would provide such a detailed validator — for anything, not just CF7 forms — yet not include results which could help someone make the code valid.

Unfortunately, while I was able to repair the damage, neither of these mysteries have yet been solved. I’m not sure I want to keep this plugin unless I get some answers, because I don’t want to have to wonder if something else is going to break it again. It’s just too delicate for me to depend on it.

Oh, and the mismatched paragraph tags were inserted by this board’s software. They’re not present in the form settings in WordPress. I have no idea why they were added, but they were.

Oddly enough, this was pretty much the “default” form that was part of the original installation. So the default form that comes with the plugin is not valid, is that what you’re saying?

I still think it’s strange this came up as a major problem all of a sudden and that it stopped working. I got a correspondence generated by the form only about 10 days ago. I also think it’s strange that something is capable of detecting the errors specifically, but somehow can’t or won’t manage to disclose what & where they are.

I’ll have to see what I can do to get this working, I guess. Or maybe just uninstall this plugin and add one that’s not so delicate.

All right, so they yanked this feature because someone decided “title” attributes were no longer to be used. That’s fine, I suppose, but the stated reasoning for yanking it still escapes me.

Yeah, I get that people reading things in “accessibility” modes won’t necessarily be able to see or hear the “title” attribute data, but all that means is that it will be extraneous (and therefore ignored) in such instances. It still might be read by other agents (e.g. webcrawlers) and seen by other kinds of users. Unless title attributes were bloating pages to the point of making them unloadable or something … which I have no reason to believe occurs and no one else is saying it does either … there doesn’t seem to be any good reason never to use them.

There are a lot of things in Web pages that users don’t see. Meta tags in the headers leap to mind in this regard. Are we to strip all of those things out, solely because some, or all, users will never see them?

I’d love to get a better explanation for this. Because the above reasoning … which is what I’ve seen … just isn’t cutting it. I’m also not sure why there was no notice of this change, nor any explanation for how it benefits me as a WordPress site owner to lose this functionality.

My Web host is Bluehost. Here are some stats in case they help:

Apache version 2.2.22
PHP version 5.2.17
MySQL version 5.1.61-community-log
Architecture x86_64
Operating system linux

I do have the correct permissions on the uploads directory (755) but the owner is not “www-data,” it’s my Bluehost-assigned user name. FWIW I can upload media files just fine using WordPress’s built-in uploader & Media Gallery. If WordPress itself can upload images I’m not sure why a plug-in would not.

If it’s necessary for me to change the owner of that directory, I don’t know if I can do it, but even if I could, I don’t think I’d want to take a chance on breaking my site, which otherwise works fine with the file & directory owners it already has.