Slow, no content on home page

[John Huebner]

I just installed agency on a site we are developing. I set the front page as a static page and I added content on the page.

I go to the home page and nothing appears.

Not to mention that the site is extremely slow to load with this theme installed.

[Bill Robbins]

John,

Thank you for your business first of all. The home page template’s content comes from widgets. You can add those by going to the Appearance section and selecting Widgets. The available ones are in the middle section. The locations in the theme where you can add them are listed on the right. The “Home Sidebar” is where you’d place widgets that appear on the home page.

If you’d like to send over a link, I’d be happy to take a look at how your site is loading too.

Thanks,
Bill

[John Huebner]

I have also imported the sample data that is supplied. With this theme installed the site became very slow. Also, there are no links to the internal pages as well as missing and or slow to appear content.

I assumed that if I installed the test data that it would look and act like the demo site.

In case it makes a difference we are using version 3.5.1 (most current) version of WordPress.

Our dev url is http://www.delmonicoinsurance.com.php53-11.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/

[Bill Robbins]

John,

Great question. WordPress doesn’t contain settings in the content export files. They only have the content of posts, pages, custom post types (slides and staff) and navigation menus. They don’t include site settings or widgets in particular.

You can set the navigation menu by going to Appearance > Menu. Just assign the menu you imported to the theme location and you’ll see it.

---

I took a look at the site and it’s taking an unusually long time to run your database queries which is why the site is loading slowly. There is a counter at the bottom of your source code which says:

<!-- 28 queries. 4.121 seconds. -->


By way of comparison, the demo's counter looks like this:

<!-- 55 queries. 1.231 seconds. -->

It's running essentially twice the queries in one third the time.

Looking at your test URL, I'm guessing your a Rackspace customer like I am. While I'm generally pleased with them, they do sometimes have issues with database performance. Their status site is reporting some trouble with Cloud Sites today.

Here's a couple of things you can do. You can increase the amount of memory that's allocated to your site. By default they allocate something like 40mb. You can increase that by following the instructions in this article.

Lastly you'll want to use the WP Super Cache plugin. It can dramatically speed up your site with their type of hosting environment.

---

If it would help you out to have your site set up just like the demo, send a login to support@organizedthemes.com and I'd be happy to do it for you.

Bill

[John Huebner]

Definitely a RackSpace client. Possibly a coincidence that the DB servers saw a problem at the same time that I started testing the site. I will make the changes for the home page and nav and see what happens. Most likely tomorrow, it’s just about quitting time for the day for me, hopefully the DB issues will be resolved by then.

Thanks, will let you know if there are any more problems.

[John Huebner]

I have one additional question.

I need to always show an excerpt on archive pages (archive.php) and not the full blog/post even when the comment does not appear in the post.

I’m assuming I’m going to need to recode archive.php myself to allow this because I don’t see any other way to do it. Please confirm this.

[Bill Robbins]

John,

That’s right. Agency is one of our last themes that doesn’t have an option to change that in the theme options.

Just replace the_content with the_excerpt in archive.php and index.php to make that change.

[John Huebner]

Ah, but I also need to add the link to the full post, they don’t automatically appear. 😉

Thanks

[Bill Robbins]

John,

Great question. You could add in a link below

which would create it for you. It would look something like this:

Or you can place what’s called a “filter” on the excerpt function. To do that go to the Appearance section and select Edit. From the files on your right, choose functions.php and look for this spot:

function organizedthemes_trim($text) {
	  return rtrim($text,'[...]');
}
add_filter('get_the_excerpt', 'organizedthemes_trim');

That removes the […] from the end of WordPress excerpts. You can modify it so it looks like this:

function new_excerpt_more($more) {
       global $post;
	return ' ID) . '">Read More';
}
add_filter('excerpt_more', 'new_excerpt_more');

which will replace the […] with a link this time. Save your changes and that should do it.

If you have any questions, let me know,
Bill

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