unklee

Hi Sybre,

Thanks for your prompt and positive response. I’m sorry to be the cause of more work for you!

“Could you link me to the SMTP plugin you used?”
It is indeed WP mail SMTP – https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/

“Do you remember which button you hit before you saw the error?”
I upgraded and didn’t get any problem immediately. But when I went to WP Mail SMTP in my WordPress dashboard and clicked on settings (I was going to change an email address in there), I got the standard WordPress error message saying my site was broken. I closed down and re-opened WordPress and I got the error message I sent you. That’s as best as I can recall.

“Are you able to use TSF in combination with the SMTP plugin now? After you’ve configured the SMTP plugin?”
I had already configured WP Mail SMTP, and it was working with the previous version of SEOF. All I was doing was going to settings to change an email address. So here’s the curious thing. I deactivated SEOF, changed the email setting and everything was fine except I got a lot of spam (thanks to turning Honeypot off). But just now, to answer your question, I turned SEOF back on and played around with WP Mail SMTP and there were no errors. I turned on the SEOF Extensions plugin too and still no problems. So maybe the WordPress error message is in error. I’ll keep going today and report to you if any problem arises, otherwise it may have been a false alarm. Sorry to have bothered you if that’s the case.

“Do you have PHP error logging enabled? If you don’t know, the answer is probably ‘no.’”
Sorry but I don’t think so.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by unklee.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by unklee.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by unklee.

Hi Steven,

Thanks for taking the time. I think I am part way to solving my problem and it turns out it ISN’T a WordPress problem at all.

I have discovered that Gmail has an issue of some incoming emails bypassing the Inbox and so I don’t see them unless I look elsewhere on Gmail where (up until now) I didn’t know I had to look. The issue is complex and I haven’t worked out how to resolve it but I now know that WordPress is sending the emails correctly, it is Gmail that is the problem.

Sorry to have bothered you, but I only just discovered this on the Gmail forum.

Thanks again for taking the trouble.

Hi Steven, thanks so much for your reply. I am happy to try one of those plugins, but I wonder if you’d mind me asking a couple of other questions please?

1. I have tried to avoid using too many plugins, to keep my site as lean as possible, and I have managed to code in a number of features that might otherwise require plugins. So for many years now I have used a contact form by thesitewizard.com, and it has worked well up to now. Reading the documentation, that site recommends avoiding using Gmail for because of its spam filtering, and using my host’s email facility instead (which I haven’t been using). Would you recommend this as an alternative, or is that just leaving me exposed to spam?

2. Do you know anything about why the WordPress comment notification email doesn’t work now for me (not even getting to the Gmail spam folder)?

Sorry, it wasn’t brief

Not at all. I asked and you gave me a most interesting answer. You obviously understand WordPress much better than I do and some of your issues are taking me out of my depth! Just a few thoughts on what you have said …..

I am part of a volunteer organisation here in Australia, and I inherited the task of developing their website. Someone had already set one up on Wix, so that was what I had to use. I didn’t like it at first, but I took it as a learning opportunity, and in the end I found it quite an interesting experience. It clearly isn’t as good as WordPress in many ways, but it probably is easier for newcomers because it is all done in something that looks like the WordPress blocks and you really don’t have to know anything about code. So if Wix, Squarespace, etc, are the competition, I can understand that WordPress might have felt the pressure to change.

I find the use of HTML in the block editor to be strange and difficult. Sometimes I get a message that I’m using HTML wrongly (I forget the exact wording), and there is the problem that the code is mashed up. It doesn’t seem very helpful to me.

And I do find that sometimes the changes I make won’t “take” and I have to re-load the page with the block editor and re-do my pages to get things going again. It can be frustrating like that.

One final thought. I change from WordPress.com to self hosted because WordPress posted ads in my pages (which I knew) and those ads led to over 300 additional URL calls, which slowed my page down to below 30 on Google Page Speed Insights. I do wonder whether the block editor leads to inefficient code which will also slow the site down, though clearly not as much, so I wil be looking out for that.

Thanks again. You have been very helpful, generous with your time and expertise, and interesting. What more could I ask for? ??

OK, thanks for that. It has been very helpful in pointing me in the right direction.

I have developed my own child theme so I can pretty much do anything I want, if only I can figure out how!

If you have the time, I’d be interested in a brief summary of why you don’t like blocks. I was initially opposed to them because of my background doing everything myself writing HTML and CSS, and a little PHP and javascript. So I’m not converting my first website over. But when I wanted to upgrade my wordpress.com site to a new theme a year or two back, I decide to give the block editor a try, since I thought that was the future. I enjoyed it on wordpress.com while I was happy to not try to change the styles too much, but now I have moved the site to self-hosted, I am a little more aware of its limitations. But I’m thinking I’ll stick with it for a while, but may decide to convert back to classic later.

For someone who dislikes blocks, you have been very helpful to this rank amateur, so thanks a lot!

Hi Joy, thanks so much for that information. It is extremely helpful. I began my website adventures coding in HTML, CSS and PHP, and only came later to WordPress and later still to blocks. I think my biggest problem is learning to think in terms of blocks instead of in terms of HTML.

I’d like to ask you a couple more questions if I may please. (I have searched for most of these things, but I haven’t found it easy to find answers.)

1. How would you set up in-page links? I previously used div or section tags, each with its own id. Would I put them in HTML blocks?

2. If I want to style a bunch of paragraphs (say to have a background or a box around them or have them all indented), I would previously have put them all in a div and style that. How do I do it with blocks?

3. If I find blocks generally have too large a space between them, how do I change that globally?

Thanks.

Still more discoveries. Now I know what to search for, I find that many people have reported the same problem – which seems to be in the importer, not the WordPress.com exporter – more than a year ago.

This thread shows a solution thyat is a little beyond me, but should be easily understood by people who know more about coding.

It is too late for me (I am not going to re-import now), but is it possible for someone from WordPress to modify the importer to resolve this?

Further, it seems that the comments have had all the internal </p> <p> tags changed to <br />.

Is there some what I can style these to work like paragraph tags? I could do a search and replace in the database using phpMyAdmin, but that would convert tags that I don’t want to convert.

Thanks.

Further on this, I’ve found references to a checkbox in Settings – Writing to fix invalidly nested HTML tags, but there isn’t any such checkbox in my dashboard.

Any thoughts on where I might find this setting please?

I’m sorry, that address is wrong. If I entered it, I’m sorry, I must have copied from the old site, not the new one (I am a drongo!). The site I am concerned about is https://the-way.info.

Yes, I am comfortable with the fact that the import isn’t 100% perfect, just looking for the best way forward. Your idea of “having WordPress set to fix ‘invalidly nested HTML tags’” is the sort of thing I was looking for. I’m not familiar with that, but I can look it up.

I have found that comments don’t space correctly either, so I may have to see if your fix works there.

Thanks for your reply.

Sorry to bother anyone. I worked this out. The shortcode can be placed in the text manually, and in the footer using this code:

<?php echo do_shortcode('[subscribe2]'); ?>

Too easy! Sorry to have bothered you. I just had to change the permalink settings and it was all fine.

I haven’t had a reply from Hummingbird yet, but really need the Responsive menu plugin (coding it myself is really not worthwhile), so I think I will simply do my caching another way and not use Hummingbird – assuming I can find a way that doesn’t conflict. So I will let you know if I get an answer from them, but I may just avoid the problem rather than solve it. Thanks.

OK, thanks. I appreciate the time you have given me. I didn’t realise the restriction on paid-for features.

<i>”I’m curious what you will end up with.”</i>

Hi Pierre. I hate to leave you curious. I chose SEO Framework and the Essentials extensions. So far so good, except I have a question about the Honeypot extension.

For years I have use the WP-Captche-Free plugin for my spam filtering, and it was very good. It used an approach that (I think) isn’t all that different to Honeypot, of automatically checking for behaviour characteristic of a bot rather than a human – “validating a hash based on time (and some other parameters) using AJAX when the form is posted. Comments posted via automated means will not have a hash or will have an expired hash and will be rejected.” But the plugin is no longer supported and finally stopped working properly.

But Honeypot seems to operate differently, and hence my question. In my rather poor understanding, a spam filter can move a comment to Trash, Spam or a moderation queue. Trash & Spam don’t require any action on my part, whereas Moderation requires I choose what to do – safer but more work.

Honeypot doesn’t allow spam through, but it seems to me that I have more spam in my moderation queue now. Is this the way Honeypot is designed to work? Is there some setting I need to tweak?

I also use the Hummingbird Caching plugin, and I note that this changes how Honeypot operates slightly, but I presume this doesn’t affect the matter I am asking about.

Sorry to trouble you again, but I am inquisitive.